Knowledge Base (was Re: VI, standards, politics and all that)

[Andrew Wood <ivarch@cus.umist.ac.uk>]

If anyone's willing, what I could really do with now is a list of common
questions - how do I do this, what does that mean, and so on.

I've knocked up a quick example of what I'm thinking of in Glade, but it's
not really workable yet; I still need to plug the code into my usual package
structure and add the backend. A screenshot of the window is at
http://www.cus.umist.ac.uk/~ivarch/eg.gif - the idea is that the user
clicks on "Search" and a Netscape window will pop up with the results.

Currently I am in the process of creating a web page for this project; it
will be at http://www.cus.umist.ac.uk/~ivarch/linux/lkb/ when it's ready.

I was planning on using something like Glimpse to do the actual searching of
the database, which would be stored in plain HTML or something similar. I've
already got some code from a Gimp plugin to open a Netscape window.

My only concern is requiring Glimpse to be installed. Any suggestions for
alternative search engines? (Alternatively I could include the Glimpse code
inside this package, but that makes it much bigger, plus I don't know
whether Glimpse is GPL'ed - I suspect not).

Also of course Netscape must be installed, but that's fairly likely to be
there if X is installed.

(Just realised that I could do the whole GUI in Netscape and write a
 pseudo-server that listens on a port and does the searching. Hey ho)

Donovan - thanks for the offer of help, but I don't think I'll be using Perl
just yet since the actual programming side of things is so minimal; most of
the hard work will be done by Glimpse and Netscape.

The main help I need right now is coming up with a list of frequently asked
"simple" questions, and, later, help with coming up with answers.

Later on some Perl scripting might be needed to transform the database to
HTML from whatever indexable form it starts off in. But I don't know yet.

Please email suggestions for possible "How do I...?" and "What does <x>
mean...?" questions (I'll worry about answers later) directly to me at
ivarch@cus.umist.ac.uk so as not to clutter up the list.

Quotes from "real users" would be most helpful ;)

- Andrew


On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Donovan Rebbechi wrote:

> > If people agree that this is a good idea (and it's not Been Done Before),
> > then I will start programming it and also start collecting questions and
> > answers for its database.
> 
> I think it's a great idea. However, the database will take some work to
> construct. If you're using perl, I can possibly help.