Contents Lists

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

Hi,

I wrote up a description of what a Contents List is, how we will create
it, and a preliminary draft of the Contents List categorization tree. I
encourage everybody to read this and help develop the categorization tree.  
Please note that this will be a cross-desktop solution and should not
depend on any desktop-specific libraries/tools. I am cross-posting to
several related lists.  (Send inflamatory remarks to /dev/null.)

Dan

-----

The Contents List is a list of documents on a person's computer.  (It
potentially could contain docs on the Net as well.)  It should be able to
display all the documents on the machine.  It may optionally allow the
user to only see certain types of docs at their request.  eg. newbies
don't want man pages in the Contents List. It should list each by document
title.  It should only list docs available in a specified language.

To achieve this, the help browser needs to know various things about each
document on the system, such as its title, language, subject, and type.  
This is achieved by using a short metadata description of each document as
described by the OMF specification (http://metalab.unc.edu/osrt/omf/). The
management (installation and uninstallation) and querying (eg. building
the contents listing or doing simple queries) of the metadata will be
handled by Dewey (http://dewey.sourceforge.net) which is in an early stage
of development.  The OMF and Dewey together will provide a powerful system
for managing documents (both locally and on the Net) in a desktop- and
OS-independent way.  It will make it easy for developers of help browsers
to interface the metadata, since Dewey will do much of the work, and it
will guarantee compatibility between various help browsers.

The position a document belongs in the Contents List will be decided by
the metadata author, and will be specified as an attribute to either
SUBJECT or DESCRIPTION. (OMF people: We still need to decide this.) Note
that this should be repeatable to allow a document to appear in more than
one location in the Contents List.

What we need to do now is to specify the categorization tree which will be
used for the Contents List. This will be a controlled list of categories.  
One question I have - should this categorization be considered part of the
OMF specification? Or should it be a standalone categorization?

Another issue we need to consider is how will users want to find documents
on their system.  The obvious one is a subject-sorted tree.  This is what
I present a draft of below.  However, users may also wish to view their
documents sorted in other ways, such as by TYPE.  For something like TYPE,
the categorization is simple since the OMF already specifies the TYPE as a
controlled list.  Are there any other ways the user will want to sort the
documents?

Generally, the Contents List presented by the help browser will be the
subject-based Contents List built by Dewey along with a couple toplevel
introductory docs and possibly a format-based list:
  <toplevel docs>
  <subject-based Contents List - built by Dewey>
  <format-based Contents List - built by Dewey>

eg:

  Introduction to Linux
  Introduction to the XXXX Desktop
  +Applications
   +Amusement
   +Network
   ...
  +Development
   +IDE's
   ...
  ...
  +Documents sorted by Type
   +API
   +Application Manuals
   +Articles
   +FAQ's
   +HOWTO's
   +Man Pages
   +TexInfo Pages
   +Tutorials
   +White Papers
 
Of course the way this information is presented is up to the author of the
help browser and could be somewhat different.  This is just a concrete
example of how it may be done.

Finally, here is a very preliminary draft of the subject-based Contents
List categorization.  We all need to beat on this until we have a
categorization which we are all happy with.  Please send additions to me
and I will merge them into the tree.

Oh yes - and I'd like to thank Kevin Breit for helping me create the list
below.

Dan

-----

Subject-Based Contents List Categorization - Draft 0.1 - 08-21-00
-----------------------------------------------------------------
+Applications
  +Amusement
  +Applets
    +Amusement
    +Monitors
    +Multimedia
    +Network
    +Utility
    +Clock
  +Education
    +Arts
    +English
    +Math
    +Music
    +Science
    +Technology
    +Testing
  +Games
    +Arcade
    +Board
    +First Person Shooters
    +Puzzles
    +Fighting
    +Role-Playing
    +Strategy
  +Internet
    +Chat
    +Email
    +Fax
    +File Sharing
    +FTP
    +Internet Phone
    +Messaging
    +News
    +Video Conferencing
    +Web 
  +Multimedia
    +Graphics
      +3D Modelling
      +3D Rendering
      +CAD
      +Capture
      +Conversion
      +Drawing
      +Editing
      +Viewing
    +Sound
      +Analysis
      +CD mastering
      +Conversion
      +Editing
      +MIDI
      +Mixers
      +Players
      +Recording
      +Speach
    +Video
      +Capture
      +Conversion
      +Display
      +Editing
  +Office
    +Calendar
    +Data Processing
    +Database
    +Email
    +Financial
    +PIM
    +Plotting
    +Presentation
    +Publication
    +Word Processing
  +Other
  +Scientific
    +Astronomy
    +EDA
    +Math
    +Visualization
  +Security
    +Cryptography
  +Text Editors
    +CLI
    +GUI
  +Utilities
    +Compression
  +X
    +Configuration
    +Screensavers
    +Window Managers
    +Desktops
      +CDE
      +GNOME
      +KDE

+Development
  +Databases
  +Development Tools
    +Build Tools
    +Code Generators
    +Configuration
    +Debuggers
    +IDEs
    +Packaging
    +Profiling
    +RAD
    +Version Control
  +Environments
    +Ada
    +C
    +C++
    +GNOME
    +gtk+
    +KDE
    +Perl
    +Qt
    +Tcl/Tk
    +WebML
  +Kernel
    +FreeBSD
    +Linux
    +NetBSD
  +Libraries
  +System Calls

+General
  +Linux
    +Distributions
    +General

+System
  +Administration
    +Backups
      +Local
      +Remote
    +Filesystems
    +Networking
      +Appletalk
      +PPP
      +SMB
      +TCP/IP
      +DNS
    +Users
  +Configuration
    +Config files
    +Configuration Tools
  +Hardware
    +Processor
    +Hard disk
    +Removable Storage
    +Memory
    +Ethernet/Modem
  +Installation
  +Security
    +Firewall
    +Intrusion Detection
    +Virus
  +Services
    +HTTP
    +FTP
    +SMB
    +SSH
    +Telnet
    +Syslog
    +BIND
    +Printing