Currently we have short names for record schemas and context sets and
these can be explained in their respective sections in ZeeRex.

But it seems to me that we could have a better name resolution system,
such that any sort of identifier can be given one or more aliases on a per
server basis.

I don't have a concrete proposal, but here's a use case:

In a relevance ranking extension, we should be able to specify the
algorithm to use to generate the relevance per record, for example
Google's PageRank, Logistic Regression, CORI etc. There's also a second
algorithm that can be selected on how to combine ranked result sets, for
example normalised sum, mean, cmbz etc.

For such an extension to not go against the grain of SRW's extensability
concept, we would need to be able to assign URIs to each algorithm and
then give them a short name to use in the CQL query.

Eg:
  dc.title any/rel.algorithm=cori "fish squirrel"
    and/rel.combine=mean
  dc.author any/rel.algorithm=lr/rel.constant1=0.705 "sanderson taylor"

This would thus need to be in the ZeeRex record somewhere.

There's two options that I see:

  * ZeeRex needs a space to put in such definitions in a general fashion.
     Something like:
     <mappingInfo>
       <item name="foo" identifier="http://.../"/>
     </mappingInfo>
     This would also allow secondary aliases for existing maps. You might
     want to have 'dc' be an alias for the current version of the DC
     schema, but also have dc10 and dc11 as aliases for the different
     versions.
     The item should also include a 'type' such that you can have a
     recordSchema named 'dc' and a context set named 'dc' without them
     overlapping.


  * Each extension that needs to do this should give instructions on how
     to extend the ZeeRex record.
     So for example the relevance ranking extension might include
     <rel:rankingInfo>
       <rel:algorithm name="lr" identifier="http://..../" />
       <rel:combination name="mean" identifer="http://..../" />
     </rel:rankingInfo>

     This doesn't allow secondary aliases and might fill up ZeeRex records
     with lots of little extension Info blocks. But does allow extensions
     to include information other than a simple mapping of name to URI.


Thoughts?

Rob

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      ,'/:. Dr Robert Sanderson ([log in to unmask])
    ,'-/::::. http://www.o-r-g.org/~azaroth/
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