Mike,

>>>> [log in to unmask] 09/23 11:44  >>>
>> I would like to propose the addition of some reserved tags in SRW
at
>> the level of <SRW:records> to allow for unsollicited response items
>> like fuzzy match terms and an index scan.
>
>(Sorry, Theo.  It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.)
>
>I propose that we do no such thing.  Once more, the lesson from a
>decade of Z39.50 is that, in order to achieve _meaningful_
>interoperability -- that is, something you can use for finding useful
>stuff rather than merely for throwing demos together -- we need
_more_
>precision and rigidity, not less.
>
I do not see the relation of this answer with my proposal. But let me
put it in a different way.
Suppose a user wants to do a search on any index and if the answer is
no hits he wants to do a scan. He does not know the reason of getting no
nhits and for targetsthat give no nhits he will do a scan and if that
does still give no results he will try all indexes separately. The user
may want a client that does this automatically for him. So a developer
builds such a client. Especially for metasearches I can image that
dataproviders prefer a way to deal with this in a proper way at the
server and put extra data in the response rather than having clients
saying "try this and try that".
My proposal is to define a SRW field for these type of responses, so
that it can be part of the searchRetrieveResponse.
This WILL help in finding useful stuff. This will NOT interfere with
precision and redigity. And yes, when it is a nice feature it is nice to
put it in a demo (better than not demontrating nice feautures or
demonstrating not-nice features).
The alternative is all kinds of local additions to the SRU-protocol
because I am sure that there are a lot of dataproviders and service
providers find this kind of additions very usefull.

The lesson that I learned form Z39.50 is that we need a more data
driven approach rather than a request driven approach and my proposal is
to allow a data driven response (optional) and in addition to the
request driven response.

I hope it is possible to discuss my proposal during the meeting.

Theo