Concrete examples of Z39.50 terminology?

I've started reading the Z39.50 standard a couple of times now, and failed
due to the peculiar maze of terminology.  I suspect (hope) it wouldn't be
as bad as it looks if I had some mental mapping onto more conventional
terminology.  The glossary in the standard is helpful, but without any
concrete examples it's unnecessarily hard work:

http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/markup/02.html

Does anyone have an equivalent of this page, but with some trivial
examples?  No need for any detail, just enough to give you a mental map
without having to read the entire thing four times over!

Acutally, while I'm about this, I may as well ask: what is the standard
term (if there is one) for a mapping between different representations of
a single abstract record (eg. 'start year' and 'end year' and their values
might be merged into a single 'YR' year range field; this together with
further similar rules forms the mapping).  Note that my use of any terms
in the previous sentence that happen to have precise meanings in Z39.50 is
purely accidental: I just mean the usual vague English meanings.  I'm not
looking for the term used in Z39.50 for this kind of mapping, rather one
that is understood by people from database, SGML, XML, Z39.50 backgrounds
alike.  I fear there is so such term, but if there is one, I'm sure
somebody here will know.  This stuff is more slippery than it looks -- I'm
not even sure I have the right question here...

I *think* in Z39.50 the above-described mapping is (as usual when you want
to convert between any two of some arbitrarily large number of
representations, N, to avoid having to write a specify a conversion
between every pair) separated into two halves: two abstract record
structures converting to and from particular representations via some
normalized form?  Or have I got this completely wrong / drastically
oversimplified??

Thanks for any help


John

Received on Sunday, 3 March 2002 14:17:24 UTC