RE: Concrete examples of Z39.50 terminology?

IMHO, a lot of the terminology stems from OSI days or other terminology
which was in fashion circa the late 80's hence APDU for something I'd
regard as message in todays parlance, origin for client, target for
server etc.

One of the intents of the 2001 redraft of the standard (primarily due to
NISO requiring a revote on any standard every five years even if nothing
has changed) is to address the terminology issue and bring it inline
with common technical parlance (as far is feasibly possible).

The draft is at
http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/revision/revision.html. I don't know
where we are at present in the NISO ballot stages but I'm sure that any
comments you have re comprehensibility (or lack thereof) will be
appreciated (wo'n't they, Ray?).

Matthew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John J. Lee [mailto:jjl@pobox.com] 
> Sent: 03 March 2002 19:17
> To: www-zig@w3.org
> Subject: 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 Tuesday, 5 March 2002 04:51:27 UTC