Re: Terms and display terms in scan

> Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 09:37:51 -0500
> From: "Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <rden@loc.gov>
>
>> I say that whatever "displayTerm" is used for, "term" itself _must_
>> be that which can be submitted in a search, ....
>
> I don't think this assertion is under challenge. You're right that
> the comment directly imply or address this point but it's always
> been my impression that everyone agreed that terms returned via scan
> are for purposes of using in a search.

OK, then I'll stop being so bolshie about it :-)

> > ... which soundex output such as S123 clearly is not -- at least,
> > not for any normal index.  Ergo, it can't go in the "term" element
> > of a scan response.  The "term" must contain stuff like "Smith"
> > and "Smythe".
> 
> Well I can only tell you that when this was developed (1994) the
> intent was that 's123' goes in the search and not "smith". If that's
> not true in practice then we need to amend the standard.

Well, that's interesting but (stop me where I get too arrogant) merely
suggests that mistakes were made in 1994 :-)  Unless, of course,
people were scanning on ready-soundexed indexes such that searches
submitted against them would use "S123".

So, given indexes such that the searches
	dc.author = (smith or smyth or smythe)
and
	weird.readySoundexedAuthor = S123
are equivalent, then yes, scanning on weird.readySoundexedAuthor
should indeed yield "S123" as as the "term" part of a Scan response
(with the displayTerm probably saying something like "Smith, Smyth,
Smythe").  But a scan on dc.author should _never_ yield such terms.

(And why would anyone want a weird.readySoundexedAuthor index?  Users
will never search against it, so its only use for searching is to
follow up a scan; but that search is equivalent to any of
       dc.author =/stem smith
       dc.author =/stem smyth
       dc.author =/stem smythe
anyway, so why not just use one of those?)

 _/|_	 _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike@indexdata.com>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Finland!  Finland!  Finland!  The country where I quite
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	 Obligation Album"

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Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 10:53:56 UTC