Theo van Veen wrote:

> Can anyone explain to me the added value of distinction between dc.title and bath.title in CQL.

Well for one thing,  that there is no Bath.title; there are .bath.titleWord, bath.titleWordRT, bath.titleExact, bath.titleFirstWords, and bath.titleFirstCharacters.

We haven't defined DC abstract indexes yet but it's likely that there will be a single title index for dc title: "dc.title"  which will be defined in terms of a single use attribute, title, with no other attributes listed (or it may be defined in terms of the cross domain set) or it may just be defined as "a dublin core title", which, in some sytems, means a different index than a Bath title.


> In my point of view not supporting Ralph's premises means not supporting prefixes. Or did I misunderstood previous discussions and is everyone already on this track?

Yes, I think you misunderstood.  I believe the consensus is this:
1. There will be some well-know prefixes, e.g., bath and dc, and you won't have to use Explain to discover  a server-specific definition for these.
2. A server is free to define server-specific prefixes (as long as they don't clash with the well-known prefixes) and you might have to use explain to discover those.
3. You can send an index name without a prefix, but in that case the server applies the default prefix, and you'll need to use explain to find out what that is for a given server (there won't be any global-default).
4. Distributed searching is theoretically possible, but all indexes should have well-known prefixes. (Or, you could send non-prefixed indexes to different servers but you cannot assume that they mean the same thing to different servers.)

--Ray