Edward McNeeley wrote >
>Bill, I beleive the Netscape Catlog Server is still using the Verity
>engine. Can you comment on the Verity product's flexibility to
>incorporate the metadata scheme once you decided this was the way to go?
>What serious problems, if any, did you have defining the fields to Verity
>and adding this detail to the basic search product?
>
When you know how to make the thing work, it is easy to extend the 'hello
world' scenario to something very useful. I'm afraid I found the learning
curve up to that point pretty steep though.
Documentation for both gathering and indexing, and the user interface
design is dispersed through many sources, some included with the product,
some on the help site, some in a netscape run news group. It is easy to
miss something very important. If you had some prior experience of the
Verity engine's inards, I think you might get going faster.
>From the search engine side, once you have tricked the beast in
recogonising all your scheme's fields as discretely seachable, it would
appear you have the full power of topicSearch's functionality at your
disposal. The approach I took was to hack stacks of PERL out of the
Netscape interface to create a simple search page
(http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/catsrch/catsrch.html), and then to offer the
complex search interface pretty much out of the box. The documentation
which tells you what is possible with the Verity engine is available via
the above URL.
Anyone who would like more advice on the specifics of implementation (like
the fact that a dot in a field name breaks the indexing, etc.) contact me
off list and I'll do my best to talk you through it.
If I ever get some time I'll write a guide which goes from paper schema
design to working field specific search engine.
Regards, Bill
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-- Bill Worthington, ERDC, University of Hertfordshire, UK ----
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