[sugar] New multilingual dictionary activity

[Samuel Klein]

 2008/3/11 Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>:
> On Mar 12, 2008, at 12:21 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:
>  > That works for a small group tweaking a large database.
>
>  How is that not appropriate for each user's personal dictionary?

Having separate activities for maintaining personal and
highly-collaborative dictionaries is fine.  Jameson was talking about
a school collaborating together on a dictionary over time.

>  > For any (initial) corpus, at some point user modifications are
>  > significant.
>
>  Even 500 words out of, say, fifty thousand is not very significant
>  when it comes to making the choice about backend implementation.

1% is not so significant.  In the long-term collaborative use case, at
some point users have touched every word in a dictionary and added new
ones.

>  > Consider many users revising a small database.  Do they have to share
>  > updated corpora and "recent modifications" separately, as database and
>  > overlay files?
>
>  That strikes me as fairly much optimal, yes. Is there a problem with it?

Not as long as the modifications remain small, and someone regularly
updates and shares a patched corpus.

>  > For speed, why not have a constant database that is checked on reads,
>  > and perform slower queries on "edit" / "update cached term" / "update
>  > all"?
>
>  I don't know what this paragraph means.

Instead of a (static core, dynamic overlay) where the overlay is
most-recent and checked first, you could use a (dynamic core, static
cache) where the core is most-recent and the cache stale and possibly
incomplete, but checked first unless the user tries to edit or asks
explicitly for an update.

SJ