At 01:14 PM 4/28/99 +0200, Frank A. Roos wrote:
>
>Search engines on the Web do not sort, they rank (mostly in an odd manner,
to me at
>least), whereas OPACs sort.
That's because there's a great deal of difference between the data being
searched on the web and the data being searched in a file of metadata
records. Full text is very rich, semantically, and allows for the
possibility of distinctions between items that you cannot make in a file of
metadata records that contain few topical terms. When you attempt to rank
bibliographic records your ranking is much less meaningful than a ranking
of full text; to begin with you may have no words that are repeated, yet
all are very important. So we can't assume that we can apply Web-type
ranking to metadata - it will need a different treatment and I have yet to
see a successful implementation of ranked metadata retrievals. Anyone?
----------------------------------------------
Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.kcoyle.net 510/987-0567
----------------------------------------------
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|