DASL Spec

I have been reading the spec, and the discussion since. Here are a few
things that need to be taken care of:-

1) I think the spec should say something about the language (like English,
French, German, - SQL, VerityQL) of the query, at least for servers that
support content-based retrieval(CBR?). The only thing I can find is 5.6.1
and 6. Much of the useful value add of a text based search comes from
things like:-

Case In/sensitivity
Phonemic In/sensitivity
Stemming
Thesaurii
Part of speech analysis

all of which are related to the natural language. I think that in 5.13 we
should at least require that if they invoke the "CONTAINS" operator, they
must have specified the natural language the client is using in his query.

2) To prevent buffer overflows don't you want to say "The server MUST honor
the limit" in either 5.14 or 5.15?

3) 5.16 is too limiting in that it allows only two values for case
sensitivity (0 or 1). In real life, things are much more complicated - one
could choose to ignore accents also for example.

4) The note in 5.17 should refer to query results, not queries, since that
is what the score is associated with. Also, I hope there is some indication
somewhere about where the result came from, so that scores can be compared
if it is valid to do so.

NIket Patwardhan

Received on Thursday, 16 September 1999 03:37:47 UTC