Re: [Tracker] Additions to Tracker Ontology for Chinese Use Cases

["Compton, Matthew" <matthew compton windriver com>]

> From: Florent Viard [mailto:fviard lacie com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 3:04 AM
> To: Tracker mailing list; Compton, Matthew
> Subject: Re: [Tracker] Additions to Tracker Ontology for Chinese Use Cases
>
> Hi,
>
> Don't know for your question, but I have a question for you regarding
> the management of Chinese characters: how do you manage to
> convert/associate a Chinese character with its associated pinyin? Do you
> store a complete dictionary of pinyin by Character in Tracker?

A library will be used to perform the conversion between Chinese characters and their associated pinyin 
representation. I believe that the library will have a large table mapping each Chinese character to a pinyin 
word, but there are no plans to store this table in Tracker. We are simply looking for a way to store the 
resulting pinyin conversion in Tracker so lookups and sorting of contacts by their Pinyin representation can 
be performed quickly. Where and how the conversion occurs is outside to scope of Tracker.

> Regards,
>
> Florent Viard
> Software Development Engineer
> ........................................
> fviard lacie com
> www.lacie.com
>
>
> Le 12/10/2010 02:30, Compton, Matthew a écrit :
> > Hello Tracker Devs,
> >
> > I am working with a customer who would like to add two additional properties to Tracker's nco:Contact 
> > class to > support additional ways of looking up and sorting Chinese contacts. They need to store a 
> > Pinyin name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin) and a T9 representation of the Pinyin name for a 
> > contact. The T9 representation corresponds to how the numbers on a telephone keypad are mapped to English 
> > characters of the contact's Pinyin name (i.e. 2 maps to 'A', 'B', and 'C'; 3 maps to 'D', 'E', and 'F'; 
> > etc.).
> >
> > Here are some examples showing "name in Chinese" -> "name in pinyin" -> "T9 representation":
> >
> > 刘静  ->  Liu Jing  ->  5485464
> > 罗喧  ->  Luo Xuan  ->  5869826
> > 马芳芳  ->  Ma Fang Fang  -> 6232643264
> >
> > The first use case is that it is apparently very common for phone users in China to look up names in 
> > their contact list using the T9 dial pad. So in data from above, if the user clicks '5' on the dial pad, 
> > they want to perform a search using Tracker to get the results "Liu Jing" and "Luo Xuan". When the user 
> > then clicks the '8' on the dial pad Tracker would be searched again and only return "Luo Xuan".
> >
> > My customer also wants to support searching for Chinese contacts using their Pinyin names. So if the user 
> > types "L" using the virtual or physical keyboard on the phone, again both "Liu Jing" and "Luo Xuan" 
> > should be returned. If the user adds an "i", another Tracker search will be performed which should return 
> > only "Liu Jing".
> >
> > The other important use for the Pinyin name is for sorting the contacts list. My customer wants to sort 
> > Chinese names among English names using their Pinyin representation. So if the English Names "Matt 
> > Compton" and "John Doe" are added to the list of Chinese names above, the list of names should be sorted 
> > alphabetically as follows:
> >
> > 1. John Doe
> > 2. Liu Jing
> > 3. Luo Xuan
> > 4. Ma Fang Fang
> > 5. Matt Compton
> >
> > They don't want to have all of the English names listed and then have all of the Chinese names listed (or 
> > vice versa).
> >
> > I'm hoping that the Tracker project would support adding these fields to the official ontology so we 
> > don't have to modify and maintain our own version of Tracker's ontology. If you are OK in general with 
> > these two additional fields I can submit a patch that adds them to the ontology files in the Tracker git 
> > repo.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for your help,
> >
> > Matt

Matt