Draft FAQ

World Wide Web Software (www@iona.cryst.bbk.ac.uk)
Tue, 10 Jan 1995 22:41:04 +0000 (GMT)

First, thanks very much to DaveH for getting the listproc working. I
hope we can retrofit some of the missing bits at a more leisurely time :-).

The hyperglossary is a critical resource in the course and a
completely new concept. Please read the list traffic to see how we
develop it, and also read the current pages.

At present what I have done is:

-develop the technology to a state where it works 'most of the time'
-set some empty placeholders for common terms.

Alan's backbone document contains a high proportion of the key concepts
that you will need in the course and they are very well suited to be
netries in the HG. I've taken backbone, abstracted all the unique words,
removed those that are trivial or irrelevant and used the rest to mark
out the scope of a basic protein structure hyperglossary. By default all
terms are empty, although in future no one will be able to enter a term
unless all the mandatory fields have text in.

I'd be very grateful for anyone to start entering descriptions,
even if these are simplistic. The main role at present is to test out
the idea and the technology. For example, we will get a feeling about
how frequently these terms are used in other people's documents and also
problems of name collision, ambiguity, etc. There will also be many
software bugs that I have failed to crunch.

The final hyperglossary will be a very high quality, living,
extensible, curated tool. We're therefore planning that there will be an
*approved* field for the curator(s) so that they can say whether an entry
should be accepted. (This isn't a moral judgement - much more a question
of name space, clarity and unambiguity of expression, completeness of the
various fields, etc).

We'd like you to experiment - don't worry if you get it wrong
(although don't be frivolous!). More than one person can add
descriptions or indexing terms, but be careful with the latter as there
may be clashes. Also try to suggest other things that might be included.

I'll break here to catch the hypermailer.

P>