Open Design Engine

I think the Thing Tracker Network is the right idea http://thingtracker.net/

The first step in making something discoverable is putting it in a place the searcher is going to look. That's why Google's front page is so valuable; nobody ever makes it to the second page. A big point of open source is allowing people to do whatever they want, but that makes it hard to find things. We can keep the good and reduce the bad if the wide variety of portals are all connected behind the scenes. Then it doesn't matter where someone enters, they can get to anywhere else "through" that place, without "leaving" to try another place.

In this discussion, that would imply that ODE makes itself a node on the Thing Tracker Network (or whatever), allowing its content to be indexed as well as indexing external content.

Aside from that, it's important for people to understand the things they find. I'm not sure how practical it is to try to get project owners to title their projects in a predictable, consistent way...probably not practical at all. Instead, I think it would make sense to put together a sort of thesaurus-assistant for searchers. If you don't know what the thing you're looking for is called, you can't search for it, and by extension if you search for the wrong keyword you probably won't find it either. But a lot of keywords are pretty direct synonyms. Like "wire cutters" and "dykes." Some keywords are just local spellings. Like "color" and "colour." And some are just different languages. Like "one" and "uno." Finally, some words and phrases are closely related. Like "automobile" and "horseless carriage." Where words/phrases are direct, or nearly direct, replacements we should be able to help the searcher by maintaining and updating an enhanced search tool that knows to search for a wider variety of words than just the one the searcher thought to enter. It could be improved by tracking which keywords turned up the best results.

In this discussion, that would imply that ODE makes itself a node on the Thing Tracker Network (or whatever), allowing its content to be indexed as well as indexing external content.

Seems like this should be added as a feature request for consideration by the Dev team later.