 |
 |
On Sep 13, 2005, at 9:17 AM, Andrew Nagy wrote: >> What do y'all think of the idea of a spelling server -- a Web service >> taking a word as input and returning a list of alternative spellings. > > Seems like an awful lot of extra overhead, whats the need for a sever > instead of having the aspell installed along with the application? I > always use this for all of my search applications and works well > and is > really fast. I guess I don't understand the need for a webservice? Actually, I think you have a valid point. We here at MyLibrary@Ockham Central initially thought about implementing the spell checking functionality as a Web service. We then thought it would be too much bandwidth. We thought the same thing regarding the inclusion of WordNet. (There is a Web Service implementation.) Consequently we implemented them as library/module calls. On the other hand, our library/module calls are not very... modular. Implemented as Web Service we could select from many spell checking services and/or use the output in ways not necessarily expected with the hard coded versions. Maybe they would be just fun hacks. Maybe they could provide something more useful. I'm not sure. -- Eric