Accumulating votes into summaries



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Accumulating votes into summaries

Since we have chosen to handle only numerical votes in this thesis, the vote servers can perform accumulation by simply adding the new votes into running tallies of the number of terrible, ok, good, and great votes an article has already received. If votes contained more diverse information (perhaps free text keywords) the accumulation process could be easily extended to include a process such as string concatenation. While this would potentially increase the space requirements for storing the summary of collaborative information on an article, techniques such as bounding the size allowed for free text annotations could be used to hold the space requirements down. In the bounded size technique, vote servers would incorporate free text annotations into the vote database until the article had exhausted its allocation of space with any future annotations being silently discarded.

To identify the article to which the vote corresponds, we record in the vote database the full text of the article's message-id. This id is unique to the one article, unlike the article numbers used by the news servers which will vary from server to server. Because the vote servers store their information indexed by a message-id which is unique net wide, users can switch which vote server they use at any time without difficulty. This is a major advantage over the news system itself which requires users to deal primarily with only one news server, since the user's data files are keyed to the article numbers used by that one news server.

We decided to store the message-id as full text rather than as a hashed integer for the sake of compatibility with other systems. The benefit of only storing hashed message-ids is that much less space is required. Some small experiments we did with hashing message-ids shows they can be hashed very effectively into numbers as small as 32 bits by trivial algorithms. We choose to store message-ids in full text form based on the observation that many other Net News utility programs do so, and that to do otherwise would hinder interoperability with these systems. Examples of such Net News utilities are various news indexing and archiving programs, and nov or the ``news overview'' package[6] by Geoff Collyer, a program which stores information excerpted from article headers in full text form.



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Next: Interface module communication Up: Vote server Previous: Vote server



David A. Maltz (dmaltz@cs.cmu.edu)