#1 Collaborative thesaurus development

[Luke Kendall]

The aiksaurus tool is really useful and effective - I
regularly use the AiksaurusGTK program of v 0.15,
standalone on RH 7.2. (Today I compiled up version
1.0.1 to try out, shortly, on my new Gentoo install.)

Anyway, I imagine that as for dictionaries, one of the
main problems in developing a good thesaurus is in
coming up with the actual data. To this end, I just
had a possibly brilliant idea that leverages the whole
"Bazaar" style of collaboration.

If it had a facility for the user to easily submit
additional synonyms (by collecting the original word
plus a user-entered list of synonyms, then
automatically submitting a well-formatted email to an
automated email address), then at irregular intervals,
someone could look through the collected suggestions
and update the thesaurus.

In this way, you could easily harness the user
community to refine and update the really precious
part, the actual thesaurus data itself. The existing
thesaurus in 0.15 is actually quite good - occasionally
better than Roget - but there's room for improvement.

luke (lukekendall at optushome.com.au)