Re: interesting bug issue

[Seth Teller <seth@graphics.lcs.mit.edu>]

interesting.

why is "FLOOR" duplicated in our naming scheme?  (.FLOOR@FLOOR)

regarding name lookups:  one could imagine writing a parser for
all space descriptions at MIT, but the space of names is finite,
so instead i recommend creating a table that can be built up
lazily (i.e., whenever a name is entered that does not already
have an match in the table).  the table could simply be a
collection of strings:

   "Grier A", "34-401A",
   "Teal Room", "26-152",
   etc.

so your code would be a (case- and whitespace-insensitive)
string search, nothing fancy.

patrick, doesn't the LCS events server log an email address for
the creator of each record?  you could have your code email a
question to the creator whenever an unrecognized space designation
was used.  of course, what would the question be exactly.  it
could be "please specify the formal building and room number
for XXX", where "XXX" is the human-specified location (e.g,
"Grier Room").

but what if the specified location has no room number (e.g.,
"Lobby 7", "the Dot") or has one but it is unknown to the event
specifier (e.g., "classroom nearest to landmark abc")?

another issue is context:  "4th floor lounge" means one thing
w.r.t. LCS and another w.r.t. other buildings.

the only thing i can think of is to direct the event specifier
to a web page displaying the floorplan containing the event
location (if we can determine it), and ask him or her to indicate
the named space interactively, say with a mouse-click.  we could
help out by highlighting the space outlines upon mouse-over.  is
this relatively easy to do using our existing java API ?

other ideas ?

seth.

Patrick Nichols wrote:
> Gents --
> 
> 
> * * *
> Just an FYI about some interesting issues I'm hitting as I write
> code that you might have some thoughts on.  I'm writing some code that
> probes the LCS events database on the web (right now it is UNDESCRIBABLY
> ghetto and inefficient, but it works... sort of) and I'm hitting an issue:
> for my signs to work, rooms are uniquely identified using a global
> namespace. The naming scheming Jason used (and hence I use) looks like:
> 
>   NE43-218 -> NE43.2@2@18@OFF
> 
> or generallly:
>   [BUILDING NAME].[FLOOR]@[FLOOR]@[ROOM NUMBER]@[OFF|CONF]
> 
> The issue is that in the LCS events database, most rooms are referred to
> in their general usage at MIT (eg NE43-218) or as text descriptions ("the
> 4th floor lounge").  I'm writing a lookup function for now that translates
> rooms to their known namespace equivalent, but I'd appreciate it if any of
> you code ninjas out there can think of a better way of doing things.
> 
> -Patrick
> 
>