...I wonder if a dynamic navigation based on search relevance and basic rules could actually be built in a useful manner. Define a hierarchy and constraints on elements in the hierarchy and turn it loose....
[node title="Sitemap"]
[constraint query="//document/title like '%itemap%'" type="required" /]
[constraint query="relevence-to("sitemap") > 90%" type="required" /]
It could be useful as a navigation help, but I don't know if such "fuzzy" selectors would be good enough for the main navigation.
What I was thinking of was to add some keywords (selected from a predefined list), either in the document header or in a parallel document (if it helps performance), something like:
<doc-categories> <category name="reference"/> </doc-categories>
<doc-topics> <topic name="sitemap components"/> <topic name="generators"/> <topic name="FileGenerator"/> </doc-topics>
And generate (XSLT?) navigation maps from these, possibly using some form of taxonomy or simple topic map to organize topics:
<topics>
<topic name="sitemap components">
<topic name="generators"/>
<topic name="transformers"/>
....I'm no topic map specialist, there are certainly existing concepts and tools to do this, but a lightweight version might be good enough for our uses.
Of course, the initial values for these keywords could be generated in more or less fuzzy fashion from the existing docs, based on existing navigation features, filenames, etc.. to avoid initial manual work.
This could make a good starting point to implement the navigation features, and later the keywords could be refined manually to improve the navigation.
I haven't followed Forrest closely in the last months, but they probably have some features which would help implementing this.
-Bertrand
