RE: Call for Participation: new internet draft for WebDAV SEARCH method

> From: www-webdav-dasl-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-webdav-dasl-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Jim Whitehead
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 8:54 PM
> To: www-webdav-dasl@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Call for Participation: new internet draft for WebDAV
> SEARCH method
> ...
> > Q1) Should the draft attempt to define Query Schema Discovery for
> > DAV:basicsearch? Has anybody actually *implemented* QSD?
>
> Well, on the surface it seems reasonable to allow a client to discover
> whether a given query will be fast/slow, based on the
> implementation of the
> server. But, that said, I'm not sure what a client woudl do with the
> information. If a client's operation depends on executing a given query,
> even if it discovers the query is inefficient against a given server, it's
> still going to execute the query.
>
> Discovering new operators might be useful, but only for clients
> that expose
> the entire search syntax to a human operator.  I don't see how we could
> provide enough information that a computational agent could learn about a
> new operator in sufficient detail to know how to use it
> effectively. Either
> such a client alreadyy knows about the operator, or it doesn't.

A client might automatically take advantage of a specific extended operator
if it's available (without having to test for it using a test query).

Similarily (for properties), it may make sense to give an interactive client
the options to display a list of searchable properties. However, this might
be hard to use if we don't have also a textual description of the property.
Seems that we have an overlap with genereric metadata issues.

Received on Friday, 25 January 2002 15:58:38 UTC