On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Alan Kent wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 11:19:53AM -0400, Ray Denenberg wrote:
> > I'm in favor of moving forward, quickly,
> > with some form of the proposal on the table.

> Humans can enter SQL, but its not for novices.  I think its reasonable
> to pitch CQL at the same level.

I think that this is a good analogue.  Most people don't enter SQL
directly, but it's definitely possible to do so, and the same goes for
CQL.
This seems like a good benchmark for 'is this too much to put in CQL'.

> Need to decide if reserved words and index names are case sensitive
> (dc.title = DC.TITLE = DC.Title?).

I think that it was decided that they were insensitive so that
dc.titleword and dc.titleWord were the same creature (preventing
capitalisation errors messing up searches)  There's no advantage to having
case sensitive names -- no one would have two separate indexes
distinguishable only by variant capitalisation.

> Or a GEO profile search? I am happy for CQL to have a set of operators
> hard coded to specific attribute lists ('>', '<=' for example will be,
> Hmmm - should I dare suggest the following? Only have '=' but allow
> modifiers for all of the different attributes?

The individual communities who need the extended relations are the best
people to come up with the most appropriate way to represent those
relations.  I think that the :foo modifier is redundant, unfortunately --
you could just as easily have:

dc.titleWord all "multiple words title dublin core"

We just happen to have a notation for 'all' that is =* (or whatever)

> then do we need to define what makes up a word? For example, is it
> white space separated? What about punctuation? How many words in
> the following?
>     dc.title =^ "a,b!c. e/f;g"
> Maybe it does not need clarifying - CQL just sends it through the the
> Z39.50 server and the server breaks it into words.

Yes.  It depends entirely on the server IMO.  The server knows what the
data it has is and how best to interpret queries which are spplied against
it in terms of what is a word and what isn't.  For example Rob K's example
of Chinese character searches.  When we say 'word' we're realy talking
about a 'unit greater than a character' which is commonly a word, but may
not be.

I think that your conclusion about Prox was that we were doing it
correctly, right? :)

Rob

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