On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Rob Koopman wrote:
I wrote:
> >We use relevance all the time for full text searches.  Not so useful for
> >Marc records, but we're not talking about marc records, we're talking
> >about XML records.  There should IMO be a way to say that the results
> >should be relevance ranked.

> I agree fully that relevance is important (even for marc records). I spent
> the last 3 years advocating relevance sorting for bibliographic queries.

Go you :)

> On the other hand there is more than one way to sort sets. Sets can be
> sorted alphabetically, by relevance, by database entry, by year of
> publication or any other random group of marc fields. Nobody (?)
> requires the query language to include all the other ways to sort sets.
> It is much simpler to make sorting an "out of band" attribute.
> for example (in URL syntax): sort=yop&query=bible

Agreed. But that opens a great big can of worms known as 'sort' and all
the various options of sorting that you can ask for in Z39.50.

Not that I'm against opening it, but I think that it takes us another step
away from the simple lean clean and hopefully useful SRW towards the
not-so-simple, putting on weight, slightly dirty and more likely to be
useful SRW which others don't want to go to yet.

Rob S.

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