FW: Specifying search attributes

Ghislain, you've sent your message to a dead mailing list.  I'm forwarding it to the active ZIG mailing list.

 

Ralph

 

________________________________

From: Z39.50 Implementors Workshop [mailto:Z3950IW@LISTS.UFL.EDU] On Behalf Of Page, Ghislain
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 1:37 PM
To: Z3950IW@LISTS.UFL.EDU
Subject: Specifying search attributes

 

Hi!

 

We are currently developing a Z39.50 client for basic bibliographic search.  In the first version of the client, we do not plan to allow the users to enter the Position, Structure, Truncation and Completeness attributes.

 

So my question is: should we leave these values to 0 or should we specify a value?  According, for example, to the BATH profile, an Author Search should set the attributes in the following way:

 

Use (1) set to 1003 (author)

Relation (2) set to 3 (equal)

Position (3) set to 3 (any position in the field)

Structure (4) set to 101 (normalized)

Truncation (5) set to 100 (do not truncate)

Completeness (6) set to 1 (incomplete subfield)

 

How is a server not supporting these values supposed to react?  Is it supposed to ignore them (and do as if I sent 0)?  Or will it simply return no result?  The latter is what I fear (because then the client would be useless on that server).

 

Our objective is to get the most relevant results.

 

Thank you in advance,

Ghislain Pagé, M.Sc.
Development consultant 
TELUS
(514) 392-0373 ext. 2288