[topicmapmail] Message sent in behalf of neo at altonsys.com

[michel]

hello TM folks, I'm looking for advice from you.

I've been reading about TMs and similar technologies for a while now and 
I want to build a website based on such technologies that is basically a 
quite versatile recipe repository.
While I believe I am now familiar with most of the features TM offer, I 
feel I have problems on translating my needs into practical TM.
I have noticed the internet abounds with theoretical and academic 
material on TM, unfortunately not much practical, hands-on approaches. 
At least I couldn't find much.

So this website is about managing recipes, but I'd encourage you to see 
pretty much any kind of entity as recipe. Like managing cars, or books, etc.
The user can add recipes to a repository, can use them to create menus 
for a week, can rank them in many ways, can share them with other users.
But I want to keep everything very flexible.
For example, I want the user to be able to define to some extent what a 
recipe means to him, by describing the set of attributes a recipe has. 
Of course there is a a set of common and obvious attributes a recipe has 
but beyond this, users of different interest, backgrounds are interested 
on quite different things on a recipe. For example some users want to 
store about a recipe if it is "halal" or not, or "kosher", or what 
degree of "decadence" a recipe has :)
I don't think that providing a big list of such attributes upfront for 
the users is suitable. I want the users to be able to add such 
attributes on the fly, that would only make sense to them (and others if 
they share them). It might be required to ask the user for the type of 
such attribute (like numerical, set, taxonomy, etc.) I thought TMs is 
ideal for modeling something like this. But how exactly?

Plus, a recipe has a list of ingredients that are usually shared between 
multiple dishes. And the ingredients might require the same level of 
flexibility in terms of description. This is also something important to 
model out.

To such a versatile entity (recipe) that will exist on the system, the 
users will be able to provide various rankings, as well as to other 
users. So then a user can determine a friend's recipe rank based on a 
number of cumulative rankings. Actually the way I see it, pretty much 
anything in the system will be available for being ranked.
Of course, the system will also provide a pretty comprehensive 
search/browse of the information space based on all these attributes and 
rankings. Again, I feel TMs can model this quite well.

I am interested to see how to model my needs with the features TM 
provides. I'd love to use an ontology as well but not sure if it is the 
case, and how. And taxonomies.
I've been looking at TM4J APIs lately, so that's where I am aiming at. 
But please give me as much insight as you can on how you would design 
and implement such application.

many thanks in advance.