Finding the arbiter (was RE: proposed additions for discovery, sorting, and typed values)

At 11:18 AM 3/16/98 PST, Saveen Reddy (Exchange) wrote:
>There's a particular case in which I'm interested here. Suppose a server
>offers searching on every resource -- making it easy for the client to
>perform searches, by essentially making every URI available as a search
>arbiter. In this case clients don't have to go find an arbiter -- they can
>whatever URI is at hand. 

This raises a point that applies to DASL as a whole not just my proposals,
so I am elevating it to a separate reply, namely how can one discover the
query arbiter for an arbitrary URI.

That is, you have a URI (http://foo.com/rumors/) you want to search.  How
do you find the arbiter?  

Saveen's example has the client just knowing (somehow) to send the search
to foo.com/rumors/

I think the answer in the general case is that you can't discover this.
Consider Web crawlers, e.g. Lycos may index (be an arbiter for) foo.com,
but foo.com doesn't know this and no property of any resource at foo.com
can tell you to use Lycos as an arbiter, unless both Lycos and foo.com
cooperate.  So it's impossible in general.

However it will often be the case that the URIs can know the location of at
least one arbiter (e.g. if foo.com supports DASL for it's own contents),
and in this case it can be specified by a property on the URI.

I propose we define a new property arbiters which holds a list of href each
element of which is a URI of a query arbiter (believed to) be able to
search the resource.

Received on Monday, 16 March 1998 15:15:32 UTC