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Contents
--------
1. Building the Remembrance Agent
2. Creating a database from a collection of text
3. Using the Remembrance Agent in Emacs
1. Building the Remembrance Agent
----------------------------------
The RA back-end has two executables, "ra-index" and "ra-retrieve", which
together make the system called Savant. Since you are reading this file, I
assume you've already uncompressed and untarred the RA distribution. To
build Savant, cd to the RA directory type:
./configure; make
This should analyze your system, and then make appropriate binaries of
ra-index and ra-retrieve. If you have trouble, make sure you are using the
GNU version of make ("make --version" should produce something sensible).
It might also be called "gmake" on your system. Once the compilation is
finished, the code you will need is:
main/ra-index: Binary file for indexing documents
main/ra-retrieve: Binary file for retrieving documents
other/remem.el: Emacs interface to Savant
Move ra-index and ra-retrieve to wherever you normally keep executables.
Copy remem.el to wherever you keep emacs-lisp files. If you don't have a
place for elisp files, you can just create a directory called "elisp" off
of your main directory and put them there. You can then delete the source
files if you like.
2. Creating a database from a collection of text
-------------------------------------------------
Savant has two executables, one which indexes documents into databases, and
one which performs interactive retrievals from these databases. To index,
you must have a set of source text-files, and a directory Savant can put
database files into.
Usage:
ra-index [-v] [-d] [-s] <base-dir> <source1> [<source2>] ...
[-e <excludee1> [<excludee2>] ...]
The <source> arguments may be files or directories. If a directory is in
the list, Savant will use all its contents, recursing into all
subdirectories. Non-text files and backup files (those appended with ~ or
prepended with #) are ignored. It also ignores dot-files (those starting
with .) and unless you specify the "-s" flag it will also ignore symbolic
links. Any files or directories specified after the optional -e flag will
be excluded. Savant will use any files it finds to create a database in
the specified base directory, which must already exist. The optional -v
argument (verbose) will direct Savant to keep you updated on its progress.
So for example, ra-index -v ~/RA-indexes/mail ~/RMAIL ~/Rmail-files -e
~/Rmail-files/Old-files will build a database in the ~/RA-indexes/mail
directory, made up of emails from my RMAIL file plus all files and
subdirectories of ~/Rmail-files, excluding files and directories in
~/Rmail-files/Old-files. The optional -d flag turns on debugging
information.
***IMPORTANT***: Savant can build databases in any directory you like, but
the emacs interface for the Remembrance Agent expects a particular
structure. For each database you want to make, you should create a
directory, and all these directories should live in the same parent
directory. For example, for my own use I have a directory
~/RA-indexes/, and within that are the directories ~/RA-indexes/mail/,
~/RA-indexes/papers/, etc. which actually contain the database files.
To see how Savant interacts with emacs while the remembrance agent is
running, try running ra-retrieve with the command 'ra-retrieve -v <base-dir>'
after creating a database using index. You can use ra-retrieve as a simple
search engine, but usually ra-retrieve is only called by the emacs
front-end.
3. Using the Remembrance Agent in Emacs
----------------------------------------
You can load the Remembrance Agent automatically every time you run emacs
by adding this line to your .emacs file in your homedir:
(load "remem.el")
This assumes that you put remem.el into a directory that is in your emacs
load-path. To set that loadpath to include the directory ~/elisp/, you can
use the line:
(setq load-path (append (list (expand-file-name "~/elisp")) load-path))
Before the Remembrance Agent can be used, several variables must be
configured. These are listed at the top of remem.el, and are documented
there as well. You will either want to set these in your .emacs file or
create a file called "remem-custom.el" and load that file after loading
remem.el. You probably don't want to set them in remem.el, unless you are
the only person using this copy of the remembrance agent.
(setq remem-prog-dir <prog-dir-string>)
(setq remem-database-dir <database-dir-string>)
(setq remem-scopes-list <scope1, scope2, ...>)
<prog-dir-string> should be the full name of the directory where you put
the ra-retrieve executable, enclosed in double quotes. This defaults to
"/usr/local/bin". On some systems, you need to make sure not to end the
directory with a slash ("/").
<remem-database-dir> should be the full name of the directory which holds
your database directories, enclosed in double quotes. Note that this is
the name of a directory containing directories, not the directory
containing the database files themselves. This defaults to "~/RA-indexes".
On some systems, you need to make sure not to end the directory with a
slash ("/").
remem-scopes-list: you can display several different "scopes," all with
separate processes performing retrievals simultaneously. Scopes can have
different databases, update frequencies, and ranges of words it uses for a
"query." Each scope looks like this:
(DIRN NUM-LINES UPDATE-TIME QUERY-RANGE)
DIRN is the subdirectory of remem-database-dir with the desired database
(This is the name of a sub-directory in remem-database-dir)
NUM-LINES is the number of lines that you want the scope to show (initially)
UPDATE-TIME is the time between scope updates (in seconds)
QUERY-RANGE number of words around your cursor that you want the scope to query on
For example, my own customization shows this:
(setq remem-scopes-list '(("my-email" 6 5 500)
("my-notes" 2 10 500)))
This sets up two scopes. The first displays six suggestions from the index
directory "/home/rhodes/RA-indexes/my-email/", updated every five seconds,
based on the last 500 words around my cursor (where a word is considered 5
characters, so that's really just the last 500 X 5 = 2500 characters). The
second scope displays two lines from "/home/rhodes/RA-indexes/my-email/",
updated every ten seconds, also based on 2500 characters.
The rest of the customizations set colors, logging, display of suggestions,
display thresholds and the prefix for RA commands. The default colors are
set for a light background, but shift if you set hilit-background-mode to
'dark. They're all documented in remem.el -- play around with them.
Okay! After these customizations are made, you can start the
Remembrance Agent by typing C-c r t. It will create its window and
after a moment or two begin to display suggestions like:
1 + rhodes RA presence paper stuff 04/14/97 papers suggestions, ra
2 tara Questions digest for IA class 09/15/97 agents-class remembrance, agent
3 ++ rhodes RA Projects Internal 03/09/99 ra-bugs-archive window, display
This can be summarized as
<Line#> <rating> <author or file owner> <subject> <date> <filename> <keywords>
The rating is a measure from zero to two plus signs (0 to 1 if you set
remem-print-exact-relevance-p to t) and indicate how relevant the document
is to a sample of your current buffer. If you have
remem-print-even-bad-relevance-p set to t then suggestions below the
minimum threshold will print with a "-" sign, otherwise they'll show up as
"No Sugestion." To see a suggested document, type C-c r <ID# of document>.
The keywords are the top five keywords that contributed to making this
suggestion, in order.
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