GNOME integration with the Free Encyclopedia.

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim styx net>]

I'm crossposting this between the encyclopedia list (which sprang out of the
suggestion of a free encyclopedia project, on the gnone-list last week), and
the gnome-list, because some of the thoughts I'm venting here are relevant for
both lists.

Now that it seems some of the submission and management infrastructure of the
encyclopedia project is falling into place, I'd like to think about what can be
done once we have this set of data. As it's looking now, we're probably going
for a reasonably structured format, possibly an XML DTD. There are countless
ways this could be of use for GNOME, for instance.

Does anyone remember how NeXTStep used to integrate a dictionary with the OS?
In any program containing text, wherever, you could just select a word, and
press a universal hot-key (I think it was Ctrl-? or something similar), and a
little window with the dictionary definition of the word would pop up. This was
extremely handy, and I'm sure it would be even handier for people who are
trying to read texts in a language which is not their native one.

In addition, reference materials could have a software framework that would
allow them to tie into any application (probably using CORBA or similar, which
would allow you to connect directly to a central server for such material), to
do dictionary and thesaurus lookups in word processors, for instance.

Does anyone have any thoughs about this? This kind of content integration could
seriously increase the user-friendlyness of a system like GNOME, and would also
make the encyclopedia material a lot more available for most users. If
everything uses CORBA, you wouldn't even need to have the packages installed if
you didn't want to, you could just connect to a server somewhere on the net to
get to the stuff.

I'd like to know what you're all thinking about these issues.

-- 
   Joakim Ziegler - styx art director - joakim@styx.net
FIX sysop - FIXmud admin - FIDEL developer - Freehive admin