Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
on 10/18/01 8:54 PM, Marcus Carr at mrc@a... wrote: > David Lyon wrote: > >> For a few hundred bucks cost, don't you think it would be really cool to have >> a console in your hotel room to do the ordering from in a language that you >> understand. > > I guess it would be cooler than using the phone book or the menus in the room, > but the interest would dry up pretty quickly when the restaurant realised that > they had to change the fish of the day from blackened barramundi to ocean > trout in fennel sauce in 27 languages. (Yes, you could automate the transliteration > after all, it worked pretty well for my daughter's bike...) The cost wouldn't > be in the device, it would be in the maintenance of the system as a whole. such a system must do more than language transliteration. A well designed system must also handle equivalences and slang to get all those that avoided the web to even believe that computer searching is interesting. Merchants just select the words/phrases they want to end up in a their xml file (an interface maps the words to actual leaf/branches (ie Xpaths from an classification hierarchy), so that whenever a query is executed, such things become possible. can't think of a pizza analogy but let's use "hot-dogs". In Quebec, we call them "steamies". Other english words are "frankfurters", "foot-longs", etc.. if we are going to go through the trouble of getting people to supply tagged meta-data , we should at least solve these problems to make it possible to contribute and query; using their respective mother tongues. --dz team refind
|
