Re: Does DASL need to support structured queries?

At 10:58 AM 11/17/98 PST, jamsden@us.ibm.com wrote:

>... in order for DASL to be useful and effective, it must
>support structured searches. If DASL doesn't XQL probably will. 

I should have said that DASL is designed to be very extensible.  My
question had to do with the requirements for search in the base level DASL.
 There will certainly be possibility to define additional, more powerful
search grammars.

That said, DASL will certainly be of some non-zero value even without
structured search.  From information retrieval studies it is well known
that the typical user query is very simple, e.g. just one word.

Even without structured query, the base level query grammar in DASL will
likely meet most, though not all, usage scenarios.  We'd like to know
whether there are specific, important needs it will not meet, urgent enough
to justify the considerable effort to add structured query to this base
level grammar.

Since you mention XQL, that is one reason to *not* add it to DASL:  perhaps
it would be better to wait until XQL is done, then import it.
 
>Also, the
>content searches for HTML and XML documents would have to be structured to
>be useful. 

true for structured documents, but the DASL charter for content-based
search is to find words in text resources only, not in structured
documents.  So, e.g, no query for words that occur only in an H2 XML
element, in the *base level* DASL query.


Thanks for your quick response.

Jim


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Received on Tuesday, 17 November 1998 15:23:44 UTC