From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2001 - 09:04:31 MDT
Hal and everyone,
Thanks for the great information about Cyc!
Could Opencyc (or anything else for that matter) be set up to
be used for the Extropy Institute book store? What would be nice is a
system that could be given an author/title or isbn number along with
nothing but a top level bookstore URL (like www.amazon.com) and from
there find the book on the site, along with key attributes like the
current price.
Of course, book stores like amazon.com could make this job
very easy with a simple consistent xml data interface, but of course
there is anti motivation for them to provide this. In fact, their
format and page structure is constantly changing. They strongly
discourage you from trying to find their prices and putting such
information on your own pages in any way even though you are an
"affiliate".
The system would have to understand "book store" English
commonly used on book store sites, have the ability to interact with
search forms, including reading their surrounding text for information
on how to use them... Once it did find the right page with info about
the correct book, It must be intelligent enough to recognize the
difference attributes such as "Retail Price", and "Our Price"... not to
mention recognizing when the book is not available...
And then next month, when amazon.com entirely changes their
page structure and the way the attributes apear on the pages... It'd
have to keep on working.
Surely there has been some large project somewhere that has
done something close to this somewhere on the web? Could anyone point
me to info about anything like this? It sure is a pain to try to have
a hard coded system that breaks every time they change their format
even a little.
Brent Allsop
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