Re: Free-text search and SPARQL New Features and Rationale draft

Hello,

I hope that there will be some final decision allowing full text  
search to be provided optionally and published
by the endpoint in terms of its feature description [1]. I think, many  
implementations will provide Lucene or other
engines out of the box, others (smaller ones) don't have to in order  
to be REC-compliant.

Since "full text search" is not "full text search" I can understand  
that position. You can configure Lucene etc. in many ways (Analyzers/ 
Tokenizer/Stemming/Synonyms/Cases/... both at index and query time).
But I would'nt compare regex to full text search, there is a major  
difference (there is an index and you can do fuzzy searches). I would  
only standardize the way how "full text search" is announced in the  
endpoint description. I'm sure most endpoints will provide fulltext  
search in the end.

Regards,
AndyL

[1] http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/wiki/Feature:ServiceDescriptions

On Jul 3, 2009, at 5:22 PM, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
> The Working Group did seriously & carefully consider free-text  
> search as a feature for this iteration of standards, but in the end  
> decided against it. You can see some of the discussion surrounding  
> it in a few places:
>
> * proposal to work on full-text search: http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/wiki/Feature:FullText
>
> * discussion on 4-21 teleconference showed decent support http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/meeting/2009-04-21#FullText
>
> * discussion at the first F2F http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/meeting/2009-05-06#Full__2d_text_search
>
> The end result is that while many in the group agree with you  
> (myself included), there was enough concern about the challenge of  
> specifying it and the cost of implementing it and the relative  
> priority with the things the group did adopt that it ended up  
> falling (just) short of the mark.
>
> best,
> Lee
>
> Chris Bizer wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> I really like the SPARQL New Features draft as it outlines many  
>> very useful and down to earth features that were missing in the  
>> first version of the language.
>> One question about
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-sparql-features-20090702/#Commonly_used_functions
>> How are the chances that one of these functions will be free-text  
>> search?
>> Most web-applications today use some kind of free-text search; most  
>> facet browsers as well as most (all?) Semantic Web search engines  
>> use free-text search to enable the user to specify starting points  
>> for further navigation.
>> Many SPARQL stores already implement free-text indexing.
>> Today, people have to use dirty hacks like FILTER regex(?label,  
>> "%word1%") to emulate free text search.
>> I therefore think that it would be great if you would foster the  
>> interoperability between SPARQL stores by  including free-text  
>> search into the spec.
>> Kind regards,
>> Chris
>>
>


http://www.langegger.at
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dipl.-Ing.(FH) Andreas Langegger
FAW - Institute for Application-oriented Knowledge Processing
Johannes Kepler University Linz
A-4040 Linz, Altenberger Straße 69

Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 15:51:20 UTC