wroget

mdxi on 2004-04-10T22:52:24

Long ago I discovered the joy of Roget's thesaurus. I do not mean a thesaurus labelled "Roget's", I mean that method of organizing and listing words by shades of meaning which was devised by Peter Mark Roget. Very shortly after I started learning perl, I had the thought that an online version of Roget's would be a very nice thing to have. Last night I finally decided to do it.

First I took a look around and discovered that while other people have done the same thing, their presentation *sucks*. IMO, half the point of Roget's is browsing up and down the sections once you've been pointed somewhere by the index, and all the existing web versions I looked at give you a single section, without even "prev" and "next" links. Ick.

I'll spare you the gory details. It's living over here and ready for use/playing with/testing.

BUGS: the flatfile import is very good but not perfect. A few subsections are missing; accented characters (rare) are garbage. The index is machine-generated and doesn't have the intelligence of the crafted indices found in a paper copy (I have some ideas for using the imported database to create a better index once it's perfectly complete). Some more formatting of metadata would be nice.

Also: long-standing bug in kdict's browse-all mode fixed.


wroget

nkuitse on 2004-04-11T18:39:29

I'll spare you the gory details. It's living over here and ready for use/playing with/testing.

(Actually, it lives here.)

Very nice. I particularly like the multi-entry display. You may have just inspired me to do a command-line Roget's interface. :-)

Re:wroget

mdxi on 2004-04-12T14:36:31

Oy! What a lovely and embarassing mistake to have sitting out there all weekend. Fixed now, many thanks.

And I'm glad you like it.

Roget vs the world

drhyde on 2004-04-13T07:39:11

No doubt Roget's method of indexing has its uses, but I find an alphabetical thesaurus far more useful. It lets me get at my words a lot quicker.