Major flaw: inability to query within structure

Having read Saveen's examples, I now see that we have a very serious
problem with DASL, namely that we have (at present) no means to search
within XML structure.  For a long time I did not worry about this,
considering it of only marginal use.  I don't care much about searching the
lockdiscovery property, but now I realize that's it shows up in many other
places.

For example, suppose your application wants to store property values that
conceptually contain lists of items, e.g. a list of authors, a list of
keywords, etc.

An example of such a property might be:

<dc:Creator>
  <x:person>Goland, Y</x:person>
  <x:person>Harding, T</x:person>
  <x:person>Fischer, B</x:person>
</dc:Creator>

DASL provides no way to query for "Harding" in such a property.  

This example is not farfetched.  It is inspired by the Dublin Core metadata
set, which is widely discussed (and coming into use) in the internet
digital library community.  If DASL won't support Dublin Core types of
properties, it probably is a failure.

I started to write down my ideas for solving it, and as I thought about it
more I saw more and more overlap with Saveen's proposed solutions, so I'll
write them up as a reply to his email.

Received on Saturday, 4 July 1998 00:07:15 UTC