Re: ZNG (really explain)

  I have been meaning to try to write something about EXPLAIN - but
has been a somewhat disrupted environnment here...  Anyway, some comments:

  EXPLAIN in my opinion has been both a great success and total failure.
It succeed in what all that ASN.1 is for - those of us with our clients
talking to our servers are sending the necessary tables of information
to perform well, in a nicely designed !interoperable! way.
   It has totally failed for discovery and ad hoc interoperability, even
at the level of discovering database names.
  Be careful, or at least fully aware, if you toss the first application
in hopes of achieving the second...


  My cut at the failure is two fold:
	1. the web came along and the browser became The Client, who cares
	   about results, etc.  I.e. the market / supply is the web.
	2. in my case (and I suspect many cases) when I want good search
	   interaction, we have contracts and talking and setup work.
	   We (Lucent) are not going to spend $100,000 and hope EXPLAIN
	   will give us the functionality we require.


  BOb Waldstein,  wald@lucent.com

p.s. sorry missing the meeting, maybe the next, though Z39.50 is becoming
less certain, except as basically an openURL implementation...

Received on Friday, 28 September 2001 09:15:36 UTC