OEIS Keywords

[franktaw at netscape.net]

This may be a duplicate, but it's been over an hour and it hasn't shown
up yet in my in-box.  I've added a couple of comments from the original.
---

To really integrate the index, it seems to me that the following 
changes
need to be made:

* Provide a way to submit index entries. This could be on the sequence
  submission page, a place to specify index entries that this sequence
  should be in; or it could be a separate page.
* Sequences with index entries should automatically have a link to the
  index entry. There are a few such links in the database, but only
  for a few index entries, and they are not uniformly present (in
  particular, some sequences have such entries without being in
  the index).
* One should be able to do a search based on the index entries that
  a sequence is in. There should be a shortcut from the index to
  such a search.

One possible approach to deal with all these issues is to have a new
line type in the sequences for index entries. Adding a sequence with
an index line will automatically create the index entry (sequences are
still subject to review, of course); removing the index line will 
remove
the entry. Searching for index:<whatever> will now find these
sequences, and buttons can be added to the index display for each
index entry, to go to search for that entry.

When displaying the sequence, the index line will be displayed as a
link, the same way that A-numbers in the entry are displayed as
links. The link will take you to the index entry.

The next step is to drop separate maintenance of the index. Instead,
have a task run periodically that generates the index from the 
database.
(This will require a way to mark the "primary" sequences for an entry
in the sequence, so that this can be generated in the index. Perhaps
a leading "*" on the index line.)  There will still need to be another
source for some of the items in the index - especially 
cross-references.
It would be nice to automate this; currently not all cross-references
actually have a link to the referenced section.

(One other thing in the index is the spelling and notation guide.
This doesn't really belong here - it belongs in a separate web page,
with a link from the submit sequences page.  Where it is, it can only
be used by people who already know that it exists.)

Is %I available for this purpose?

I realize that this proposal involves a fair amount of work. I'm sort 
of
assuming that Neil has assistance available to him for this kind of 
thing -
as he did for the upgraded search capability. If that was strictly a
volunteer effort, then a similar effort would be needed for this.

Franklin T. Adams-Watters

-----Original Message-----
From: N. J. A. Sloane <njas at research.att.com>

Using the Index gives us much more flexibility, and avoids
the proliferation of keywords.

Neil