Re: The minimum set

Saveen Reddy (Exchange) wrote:

> During the DASL BOF two weeks ago we often ended up saying we needed to
> define the minimum set of useful operations that a server must support.
>
> I want to get a feeling of what people on the list are thinking here. To
> spur this on I'll deliberately take the extreme end of "minimum" and say
> that it means an operator for equality and a simple CONTAINS (with some
> variability for case-sensitivity and language).
> The scenario addressed by this minmum set above is only simple authoring. (I
> realize this doesn't even meet the very first scenario I had in my slides in
> LA, but I wanted to get the discussion going.)

 I think a date comparison is important enough to be in the minimum set.  This
isn't that advanced a feature.  I think most search engines and most RDBMS
have it or something close enough to support implementation.

I'd be inclined to include numeric comparison as well.  I'm not so sure it is
as
essential as date but it seems easier and ought to be there for consistency.

I'm less sure about word relational operators.  Internationalizable word
comparison
can be tricky and some underlying engines may not have it right.  Also I'm not
so
sure they are necessary.  Do I really want to search for documents with authors

whose last name comes before mine alphabetically?  Is there a more compelling
example of the need for relational word operators?  Probably more useful would
be
an almost matches operator that would match words that differ by only 1
character.
This is not wide spread enough to include in the minimum set of operators.

I'll say more about CONTAINS in another message.

--Rick



--
*************************************************
Rick Henderson            (Netscape)(650)937-3152
rickh@netscape.com
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Received on Friday, 17 April 1998 13:28:28 UTC