As Rod mentions, this enables indexing some of the better resources on the web as well.

This is one of the things missing in the old index that only referenced printed resources.

A must have for the new index, IMO.

...not Ron. Don't want to get confused into thinking there are two people posting.

Rod Goodwn

Sorry I got your name wrong, Rod, I know it's Rod, don't know why I typed Ron ... go figure.

...problem about the name. I've been called Ron half my life. Most of the rest of the time it has been Rod. The remainder of the time I won't mention here.

AUTHOR: How do you plan to handle variations in the use of the name, like "Bill Schaumburg", William Schaumburg" and "William C. Schaumburg"? There are about 350 in my database that have used variations.

Also, I have found a few instances of the author's last name being spelled incorrectly in the magazine. You know it's wrong when you are familiar the name, and it's spelled like you expect within the text. Another little anomaly to handle.

First, let's get the &^#@$%^^) name right!

I would suggest two more columns for this table (entity), email address and telephone number. As shown, I see no way to ever contact the user.

Rod

Now it's a Very Good Thing to get the name right, but the database Clint's using on the version we're working on supports "fuzzy search".

My wife worked for a company that did linguistic research to support name homographs, regionalization, gender matching ("Francis" vs "Frances"), etc.  That's a very interesting problem, but unfortunately not public domain/open source yet :-)

dave 

Rod,

this is a problem I noticed as well. I think there are several ways to handle this:

- leave as is. For some reason the article was published with variations in the name. Why change? What would organizations like the Library of Congress do? In less obvious case we might not even know whether this is the same author. So for public usage I would not modify the published data.

- correct it manually. This is what I did for my personal use.

- use your suggested synonym system. This would allow to leave the original data correct but help the user find the articles.

My current work is to suggest a data model based on what I did for myself. The best way to handle this situation should be decided by the developers.

Regards

Martin

Rod,

why should we have to contact the user? 

Personally I wouldn't give my email address to a service like that and even less my phone number.

I added support for a self service password reset mechanism without neccessity of an email address for exactly that reason.

It might become neccessary to get the email address as part of a two step registration process. But I'll leave that decision open to the implementors.

Regards

Martin

Dave,

I absolutely agree. Current databases have features like full text search, fuzzy search and Soundex built in. So there is no need to re-invent everything.

What database do you use?

Regards

Martin