FAQO: Frequently Asked Question Organizer

Summary

The Frequently Asked Questions Organizer is a tool for collaborative technical support. Typically there is a mail list, newsgroup or other online group where participants can ask and answer questions. FAQO is designed to make efficient use of participants time in searching for previously asked questions and answers in the message archives of these groups. Some users may be given the rights to modify or organize the archives to improve searching and intelligibility.

FAQO is an open source project released under the GPL license. It is under active development and I expect that soon it will be robust enough for wide deployment and collaborative development.

TRY IT OUT

Some details

FAQO requires Java 1.3, and has been tested under Win32, Solaris Sparc, Solarix X86, and Linux. We deliver the client applications under WebStart, which I understand will become part of core 1.4.

The FAQO Query client application is unsigned and therefore uses the "sandbox security model". It is restricted to communicating back to the host it was downloaded from. It uses the JNLP "PersistenceService" to store a few KB of configuration files in the file $(user_home)/.faqo/FAQuery/main.ser. We plan to make a servlet version of it Real Soon Now.

The FAQO Tech client application is signed by the Unidata certificate, which authenticates that the code was signed by us. Upon downloading, WebStart will prompt the user to accept the application if they "trust Unidata". By accepting, the user gives the same trust that an installed application has. FAQOTech can therefore connect to the user's IMAP and SMTP server. It also stores a few KB of configuration files in the file $(user_home)/.faqo/FAQTech/main.xml. No other local disk resources are used, nor other socket connections make (except to the FAQO Server).

The clients are 100% Java and the server is 100% Java except for the SVD solver, which is in C. The SVD code is derived from Michael Berry's SVDPACK, which is publicly available at netlib.org. He has made it freely available for research purposes. Contact him for permission for other uses. My source code contains a modified version of his software used by FAQO.

The FAQO Server should be easily ported to any machine that supports Java 1.3. We are running on a Linux machine with 512 Mbytes allocated to the heap (-Xmx512m). I have also built the matrix solving code on Solaris and Windows NT: its pretty generic C code. I am working on some notes on how to setup a server.

The FAQO source is available under the Gnu Public License (GPL). Some of the classes are part of Unidata's MetApps software, released under the LGPL. The above source jar is a snapshot, and the actual running code is undoubtably different. Contact me if you are interested in collaborative development.

Background papers

Papers:

Experiments with LSA Scoring: Optimal Rank and Basis, SIAM Computational IR Workshop (Oct 2000) pdf or postscript.
Applying LSA to Online Customer Support: A Trial Study, April 24, 2000 (Word97 or PDF file)
Design for the FAQ Organizer Application, December 13, 1999
Wide Area Collaboration: A Proposed Application April 1998

Context:

The vision thing (Feb 2001)
An earlier vision-like thing. (May 2000)

Comments, complaints and compliments: caron@ucar.edu

Page last changed: Mar 22, 2001

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