jhull@spp2.UUCP (Jeff Hull) (03/14/85)
In article <1265@amdahl.UUCP> howard@amdahl.UUCP (Howard C. Simonson) writes: >I happen to be one of the "many" mailers which advocated the tree >structure which was so prevalent in the proposed renaming. A while back somebody (Brad Templeton?) proposed a news system based on keywords. I haven't heard anything about it since, & when I queried chuq about it, he said he didn't know what happened to it. If you are still out there, please post a revised version (or if you must, repost the original). Basically, the proposal was a modification of the news sw to minimize the overhead associated with keywords, i.e., data values used to index news articles. The result of this is the net can afford many keywords, as many as needed to describe all articles. Users would be assisted by separate utilities which are based on a [local, regional, net-wide] thesaurus to suggest which keywords should be attached to an article; semi-automatic indexing. To read the news, each user can specify both a pick list (things I want to see) & a drop list (topics I do not want to see). Both lists would permit Boolean logic on keywords to set the in/visible threshold. Chuq said he didn't think the k-news proposal solved all the SNR problems, but it seems to me to be a most flexible & precise tool for selecting what news I want to read. -- Blessed Be, Jeff Hull {decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,scdrdcf,ucbvax} 13817 Yukon Ave. trwrb!trwspp!spp2!jhull Hawthorne, CA 90250