Uno slots are ID that uniquely identifies functions generally available through menus. The macro recorder uses these UNO slots to call the menu actions through dispatching. It is sometimes the quickest and only way to cover some functionalities not available through API (like copy/paste)

The OOo Framework project announced the publication of this list for OOo2.0. It is available at http://www.openoffice.org/files/documents/25/2570/commandsReference.html

An other use of the slots, less known, is to call functions directly from command line, enabling direct access to some wizards (new name for autopilots) and toolboxes:

• New doc from Templates : /opt/openoffice.org1.9.84/program$ ./soffice slot:5500
• New presentation wizard : /opt/openoffice.org1.9.84/program$ ./soffice slot:6686
• Macro organizer : /opt/openoffice.org1.9.84/program$ ./soffice slot:6691
• ...
  

Although it is disadvised, the numerical codes seem to be required instead of symbolic names in this particular use.

The thesaurus file format will change from OOo version 1.x to 2.x

The engine, myThes has been developped by Kevin Hendricks (OOo lingucomponent project lead). A standalone version is available at
http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/thesaurus.html
 
The new format is based on WordNet from Priceton Univerity
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

The main changes introduced are

• datas are now plain text, no binary anymore
• each entry can have multiple meanings and can be morphologically tagged

This new format is incompatible with old one. So existing thesaurus will not work in OOo 2.0

I'm working on a small program translating the old thesauruses to new format. It is an OOo macro accessing thesaurus API (mainly the com.sun.star.linguistic2.Thesaurus service available in OOo 1.1.x and the old .idx file which is plain text).
Once the data transformed (the .dat file is created), the new index .idx file is generated using a perl script Kevin wrote.
It is almost finished and will be released under free licence so that other native-lang OOo projects can transform their own thesaurus if needed.

Concerning morphological informations (verb, noun, adjective  ...) that are actually missing for all entries, Myriam's work (see her blog) will be of great help generating these informations.