Jordan Reiter wrote:
>
> Frank A. Roos felt an urge to reveal at 3:46 AM -0500 on 1997-10-02:
> > TYPE=map AND COVERAGE="1990-1997" AND DESCRIPTION=Melbourne
>
> Melbourne is a geographic location; it should, technically, fall under
> "Coverage" instead of "Description", right?
>
Sure. I left "Melbourne" out of COVERAGE not knowing what string
separator to use. But .... "Melbourne" can be regarded as a subject
related description content as well. There is a fine distinction between
the subject related "Melbourne" (the pubs, the people) and the scaled (I
like SCALE much better than COVERAGE, but the discussion on naming
conflict is now in a different domain) down confinement of the earth
globe, called "Melbourne".
I do not mind however to put it in both; such redundancy would do no
harm in the ocean of reduncies called Internet.
> This is certainly a search that makes sense to anyone familliar to DC, but
> not to anyone unfamilliar to it. There should be some way that search
I fully agree.
There should always be a "simple search" and "advanced search" option.
> engines first examine the syntax of the search itself, including
> recognizing non-standard dates and translating them. This search should
> work, even though it is not as specific:
>
> transcript news Jan 23, 1961
>
> should translate somehow to
>
> TYPE=text-transcript AND COVERAGE="1961-01-23" AND SUBJECT="current events"
>
> Does anyone know if this is possible? Or will people wanting to use the
> new DC for searches have to learn the syntax as well? If so, I forsee a
Search engines very probably will enable a simple and an advanced search
approach. In the simple approach some DC fields will be selected based
on usage statistics (or whatever criteria) and tossed in some sort of a
basic index, allowing a kind of free text search (with phrase search
capability hopefully).
> much smaller group of people interested in using them. Certainly, another
> option is to include a lot of fields with each of the fields pointing to a
> DC element. They would also have to be clearly defined (probably on a
> "Search Help" page):
>
> Search using one or more of these terms:
> ________
> Keywords:|______| [this would search in Title/Subject, perhaps]
> _________________________________________
> Type of Resource: |_pop-up menu, containing resource types_|
>
> ____________
> Date of Resource: |__________|
>
> And so on. Resource types, incidentally, should be listed in alphabetical
> order, not ordered hiearchally--the menu list will be a lot clearer for
> searchers if it reads "book,email,video,webpage" rather than
> "text.manuscript,text.correspondence.email,video,text.webpage".
>
> I don't know who amongst the list is working on developing a search
> "paradigm" but I hope you take my suggestions under consideration.
Searching is what DC is for mainly, I hope. So all suggestions related
to searching should guide us in doing the right thing with DC.
--
Frank A. Roos ([log in to unmask])
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