[gentoo-kbase] Glep updated, next steps

[Sven Vermeulen]

Hi all,

I've updated the draft GLEP at
http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/tmp/kbase-glep.html to include a small
paragraph on the frameworks we will use for the knowledge base. No, it
doesn't list what frameworks, but rather that they should be free and
ultimately supported by the infrastructure project.

Next, there are a few tasks which will take quite some time and where I
definitely can use your help.

First, we need to have a large set of topics (questions and answers) in a
parseable format (I suppose XML is easiest here :). It might seem strange at
first, because we don't have any technology to query them. Yet having a
large set of topics will help us to identify good and bad technologies.
After all, a knowledge base is as good as its search engine, and you can't
test/validate a search engine without sufficient amount of topics.

So we need to identify a (XML) format. Think about the metadata we require,
but keep in mind that the knowledge base is about answers, not about
creating a DTP (Desktop Publishing) file format. 

Once that is done, we need to obtain many topics in that format. We also
need someone to keep those topics somewhere, I figure a Gentoo developer
can create an SVN repo for that on the Gentoo infrastructure. 

While all this is happening, I want you all to search for possible
technologies that might adhere to the requirements in the GLEP (it doesn't
need to follow the requirements verbatimly, we can always hack at it to make
it suit our needs). If you find one, make sure to mention it on this list so
we can all take a stab at it.

When you feel that a technology is mature enough, write some script or tool
to pull in the set of XML topics we have and test it.

So, in short:
  +------------------+---------------------------+--------------> time
  | Create a generic | Write up topics in this   |
  | XML format for   | XML format and store them |
  | the topics.      | on the SVN repo           |
  +------------------+------------------+--------+------------+
  | Search for good candidates          | Test the candidates |
  +-------------------------------------+---------------------+

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
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