- From: John J. Lee <jjl@pobox.com>
- Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 19:17:17 +0000 (GMT)
- To: <www-zig@w3.org>
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