[Bug-gnupedia] how about Gnucyclopedia?

[David Tanzer]

Hi,
This project is REALLY EXCITING, it is an idea whose time has 
come.  I have been dreaming of such a project for the last year,
and wondering about how to get started, but since the
ball is now rolling fast with the spirit of GNU,
I'm going to join this ship. 

When I was mulling over names for a free encyclopedia,
my friend Raoul made the following suggestion: Gnucyclopedia.
I think it sounds cool and apt, so I'm passing along the suggestion.

I was envisioning a two-fold aspect of the encyclopedia.  First,
socially, it's chief characteristic is its freedom and its contribution 
to the movement of freedom.  We know this.
 
Second, from a technical standpoint, to the greatest extent possible,
it should be a _queryable_ encyclopedia.  Queries like the following. 
What are all the cities that border on the Danube river?  Which years 
were Germany and France at war with each other?  What are the chords 
to "Long Black Veil", expressed in the key of F? 

The ubiquitous keyword search is clearly a very primitive and 
semi-random form of querying.  A relational database is highly 
queryable _because_ it has a nicely defined data semantics.  To 
what extent can we integrate text into a semantic data model, that 
will allow the encyclopedia to answer interesting queries? 
This is an open-ended research problem, to which I have no ready
answers, but it's worth bearing in mind, and investigating as
one part of the thread of development.  

In fact, we could have one section of the encyclopedia that is
devoted to database and informatic-semantic issues.  This could
provide some well-focused content to work with, and may have the
benefit of fertilizing our minds with new ideas about how
to organize the encyclopedia for queryability.  

I'd be glad to try my hand at some tutorial articles in this
My experience is in the area of databases, and, more specifically,
I did a thesis called Queryable Expert Systems.  Right now
I'm teaching database courses at nyu, perhaps I can evolve them
into some free courseware.

What is an encyclopedia?  Perhaps: it is a view of a digital 
library, provided that the library is broad enough to include not 
just "official" books.  

>From a user perspective, it is a book that people turn to for 
basic information.  So is should contain, in addition to 
text, certain _tables_ of information, e.g., the tables
that relate countries to their populations.  This suggests
that the idea encyclopedia includes the functions of an
_almanac_.  Perhaps you would do searches based upon attributes,
in order to find the articles of interest.  Then, those
articles could contain embedded tables (or other data objects),
and you could then issue a local query to that part of
the article. 

Dave Tanzer
www.cs.nyu.edu/tanzer