Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: keyword-based news
Message-ID: <1136@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 10 Sep 88 12:02:44 GMT
References: <1127@ucsd.EDU> <2018@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Organization: The Univerity of California, San Diego
Lines: 35


Brad:

Good heavens, I wasn't criticising your KNEWS proposal - for the
excellent reason that I never heard (saw?) it.  It does seem sound, but
somewhat impractical, given the difficulties in changing the installed
base of existing news systems.

Maybe on the "new usenet" (gag, choke)?

No, those numbers and the resulting article came out of some blue-sky
dreaming several of us here at UCSD were doing one day, and since it
took our otherwise-unoccupied 3B15 nearly half a day to generate them,
I thought I'd post them in case no one else had had the time to play.

Seriously, the model we intended was along the lines of MEDLINE and
other on-line databases --- something we could add to the >existing<
Usenet news system to make nifty retrieval possible.  It actually
may be used in some modified form by our library people, who are
asking about some way to do simple yet broad classification of news
(of the AP, UPI, and Reuters variety, not necessarily Usenet).

Simply storing the articles and building the keyword index is a
relatively trivial matter, except for the sheer quantity of data
involved.  It is the ability to perform set operations on retrieved
indices that is interesting, and it may make a nice one or two-quarter
undergraduate project for some independent study student here.

I'll let you know if anything ever comes of it.

	Brian Kantor	UCSD Postmaster & Chief News Weenie
		UCSD Office of Academic Computing
		Academic Network Operations Group  
		UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA
		brian@ucsd.edu	BRIAN@UCSD ucsd!brian