[Design] Re: automatic hyperlinking, explicit URI's

[joel finkle]

>>* automatic recognition of names, places, dates, and etc.; automatic   
>>categorization of items
>
>The last one really gets me excited.  I fondly remember Pensoft's 
>Perspective PIM from the days of EO/GO's Penpoint operating system.  If you 
>write 	meet Mitch at Greens noon Thursday
>it recognizes "Mitch" as a person, if necessary asks you "Which Mitch
>do you mean", recognizes "Greens" as a location, and recognizes "noon 
>Thursday" as a time.  Every one of these turns into a hyperlink so that 
>following the link (the circle-tap gesture in Penpoint for those who care 
>:o) takes you to the person "Mitch", the place "Greens", and Thursday's 
>calendar.

This isn't an entirely novel feature.  The concept is implemented in MS 
Office XP as "Smart Tags" 
(http://office.microsoft.com/services/category.aspx?cid=4).  This is one of 
those AI-like technologies that can annoy very quickly.  When it doesn't 
recognize my boss "Om" as a name, but when things like "1200 Pines" ordered 
for landscaping shows up as an address... and so on.  The Smart Tags feature 
likes to sprinkle these purple wavy underlines under anything it "thinks" is 
linkable.  They do have a reasonable XML DTD for designing new tag types -- 
perhaps it can be leveraged?  They'[re not the only ones who can "embrace 
and extend."

Joel Finkle



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