Brian Salter-Duke wrote;
Much as I appreciate Henry's love of the Mac - I'm using one right now, although at home - I do think the solution to his problem must be platform independent including working on unix machines - linux and others, as well as PC and Mac. Is there any possibility of this?
We make progress. I have found that http://www.traquent.com/ provide a multi-search engine for Windows Machines , which is fully compatible with Sherlock plug-ins. Now we just have to solve the unix problem. With Alan Arnold's plugin http://metachem.ch.adfa.edu.au/metachem/sherlock/MetaChem.src.hqx we now have a "channel". Its pretty trival to reverse engineer these things for other sites (I have done about 4 now). If anyone else wishes to try making one for their own site/institute/organisation, please send them along! Meanwhile, we should look out for other cross platform solutions. In turn, it should be pretty simple to convert one type of plugin to another. Meanwhile, I quote a posting from Sean Luke, on another forum. Clearly, something like Sherlock has a long way to evolve yet! ============================================= "There are a few languages on the horizon that may be of interest, but they're not in general use yet. - RDF is a semantic network language developed for this purpose. It's an XML application (a language "written in XML"). It started life as the MCF project at Apple. W3C is behind its design, and it has a lot of big boys behind it. Which is ironic, because it's basically very poorly implemented. Its syntax is convoluted, its semantics are too simple for anything but very basic use, and its model (semantic networks) is too simplistic in my opinion. See http://www.w3.org/RDF/ - SHOE is a research language with much more powerful semantics than RDF, and which is easier to use and with a simpler syntax. RDF has of late been borrowing a lot of stuff from SHOE, especially the symbol-resolution mechanisms. SHOE comes both as an SGML application (a superset of HTML) and as an XML application, pick your poison. I should come clean and say that I invented SHOE a few years back, though it's in the hands of other researchers now. See http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/ - DAML is a recent DARPA initiative for designing a standardized knowledge-representation language for web pages and agent interaction. See http://www.darpa.mil/baa/#iso and look at the "Agent Based Computing" section. DAML is citing SHOE and RDF as its two big proto-examples." -- Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 171 594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)