The next file format

[Inge Wallin]

On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 00:46:04 Bruno Coudoin wrote:
> Le 24/08/2014 14:56, Inge Wallin a écrit :
> > On Wednesday, August 20, 2014 11:23:02 Bruno Coudoin wrote:

> > Yes, confidence level is not the ideal term but so far we haven't
> > found anything better. What it is is the level of confidence that the
> > student has for a particular word. This tries to capture how strongly
> > the word is put into the memory of the student, or loosely put how
> > long it can be expected to be before they forget it. If you are not
> > familiar with the term 'spaced repetition training', I urge you to
> > look it up on Wikipedia, they have an excellent article about it.
> > 
> > This used to be known as 'grade' in Parley but we are providing a tool
> > for learning and training, not for testing so grade is not applicable.
> > Besides, grades also have a negative connotation in that you are a bad
> > person if you have a bad grade. Since any low confidence level is a
> > necessary step to the higher confidence levels we wanted to get rid of
> > the grade connotations and that was the best we could come up with. I
> > guess 'mark' is vaguely similar to grade in this case.
> 
> This is clear now and it is what I understood. Then I don't think it is
> appropriate to put this data in the container for several reasons:
> - may be on a read only storage
> - may be hard to centralize the student data to let a teacher review it
> - an update of the file would overwrite the student data.

These are very good points. Originally we didn't think about centrally stored data files or 
files that need to be updated, nor about files on read-only media.

But after this round of gathering requirements we do. So our new file format will support 
separation of student training data (statistics and confidence levels) and the original word 
and multimedia data. This should satisfy your requirements that you list above.

It will also support keeping them together inside the same file, like you would use on a 
personal computer when you create your own word lists. This is a common but much 
simpler usecase.

> > Would you be interested in sharing the container format with us if we
> > can agree on how we store the internal data?
> 
> Sure, we have to continue the discussion and hopefully find the path
> that will satisfy all the needs.

I think we have most requirements now. I will write a first overview suggestion and put on 
the wiki. Since most people seem to be preferring JSON over XML I will propose that.

Regarding the ease of use of qrc files, I am fairly certain that we will be able to do a more 
or less in-place replacement API using the library that Andreas Xavier is working on.

	-Inge


> Bruno.
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