[alicebot-archcomm] Gary's AIML Services

[Jonathan Roewen]

Hi Gary,

Whilst your services could be useful, their output format isn't really that
useful. A more desirable format would be XML. I think XML would be more
suitable, as it's easier to manipulate, and would allow the output result to
be in a uniform format.

Secondly, it's easier to select/transform some XML fragment into some other
form, especially with XSLT (similar to how logs in XML are viewed in a
web-browser).

In fact, I'd recommend that if something like <fetch/> were to be added to
the specifications (still a _long_ way to go yet), it would require that
output from the service be in XML .. I don't think any other requirements on
the output would need to be enforced/required. I also think that it would
need to have an attribute allowing to specify an XML stylesheet that can be
used to transform the received XML into something useful for the user.

I think the output of your AIML Services is currently quite limiting, and
would require adding new code to process the output format, whereas if it
were XML, it could be processed by the same xml processor used by existing
interpreters, minimising effort, and also reducing problems with parsing.
It'd also remove the requirement to add a new formal specification of the
output format from a service.

Also, as an aside, could you amend your date/time services to allow an input
parameter specifying the GMT offset, eg: GMT+12 for New Zealand time, as the
AIML interpreter shouldn't need to recalculate the time difference before
showing to the user.

Once you have these examples in either an XML format, or an added parameter
to get the output in XML format, I'll look at adding a preliminary <fetch/>
tag to J-Alice, to see how such a system might work in practice.

Jon =)