Re: Bath-profile: relation to national profiles...................... ...... J.nr. 331-3

Leif;

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leif Andresen" <LEA@bs.dk>
To: <BATH-PROFILE-L@INFOSERV.NLC-BNC.CA>; <www-zig@w3.org>
Cc: "Majordomo danZIG (E-mail)" <danzig@list.dbc.dk>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 10:59 AM
Subject: Bath-profile: relation to national profiles......................
...... J.nr. 331-3


<snip
>
> Position "first in field" (value 1) gives us real problems. Library
systems
> on the Danish market don't support the function "First Words in Field". We
> have discussed in and don't see the reason for this function. We use the
> combination:
> Position = Any
> Structure = Phrase
> Compleness = incomplete subfield
> for two ore more words in connection. The Danish tradition is to use SCAN
> for a "complete phrase" to support a user who knows the word/words to
start
> a title.
> It seems not sensible to demand new indexes where the use isn't obvious.
>

It has been, and remains, my view that "first in field" was intended to be
synonymous with "field starts with" or "left-anchored".  Similarly "first
in subfield" is synonymous with "subfield starts with".  This is also the
view of the Bib-1 semantics document.  Thus an operand with structure "word"
and position "first  in field" should find those records in which the
appropriate field starts with the word in the term.  And an operand with
structure "phrase" and position "anywhere in subfield" should find records
in which any subfield of the appropriate field contains anywhere in it the
phrase in the term.  An operand  with structure "phrase" and position "first
in field" does not mean that the words in the phrase need to be among the
first words in the field, but that the field needs to begin with the term.


This implies that, in order to specify a left-anchored phrase search (e.g.
names starting "Smith, John"), you need to specify that structure is a
"phrase" and position is "first in field".  Just stating that a term is a
phrase (i.e. one or more words) does not tell the database anything about
how to match the term against its indexes - it is wrong to assume that
"phrase" means "left-anchored", just as it is wrong to assume that "word"
means "unbounded" or "process as keyword".  And certainly omitting the
position attribute does not conform with the Bath principle that a value of
each attribute type is required.

J. Zeeman
The Library Corporation
http://www.tlccarl.com

Received on Friday, 21 September 2001 12:01:40 UTC