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?

Cool none the less :)

Andrew

Eric Lease Morgan 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.
>
> MyLibrary@Ockham has indexed about 430,000 OAI records. These records
> have grossly classified into a number of domains such as mathematics,
> life science, theses & dissertations, and a master domain consisting
> of all the sub domains.
>
> Taking a hint from Bill Mosely (of swish-e fame), I have read the
> indexes, parsed out the individual words, and fed them to GNU ASPELL,
> a dictionary program. It is then possible to query ASPELL and have it
> return alternative spellings. We have incorporated this feature into
> [log in to unmask]
>
> I could make this spell checking functionality available as a Web
> service. The URL could look something like this:
>
>   http://spell.ockham.org/?word=origami
>
> The output could look something like this:
>
> <?xml version='1.0'?>
> <spell>
>     <word>origami</word>
>     <spellings>
>         <spelling>origem</spelling>
>         <spelling>irrigam</spelling>
>         <spelling>obrigam</spelling>
>         <spelling>kirigami</spelling>
>         <spelling>ariguama</spelling>
>     </spellings>
> </spell>
>
> It would then be up to the client to do with the content of the
> spelling elements as they desired. For example, the client could:
>
>   * spell check a document
>   * implement a Did You Mean? service a la Google
>   * incorporate the results into a Find More Like This One search
>   * enhance the results of an OPAC search
>   * feed selected words back to the spelling server
>
> Alternative URL's might include:
>
>   http://spell.ockham.org/?word=origami&domain=master
>   http://spell.ockham.org/?word=origami&domain=master&version=1.0
>   http://spell.ockham.org/?
> word=origami&domain=master&version=1.0&verbosity=5
>
> Writing the underlying script would be easy. Articulating a XML
> stream as output would be harder.
>
> What do y'all thinque? It would be fun at the very least.
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
> (574) 631-8604