Hello fellow SRW implementers,

Adlib Information Systems, my employer, asked me to implement the SRW
protocol. I'm about halfway done now, and
I've got some remarks and questions regarding SRW and CQL, so I thought
I'd get a subscription to the ZING e-mail list. I'd be really grateful
if someone could take the time to look at my questions and answer them
for me.

- the CQL BNF doesn't mention '/' in the exceptions for charString1

- I'd like to thank Mike Taylor for creating the SRW-1.1.pdf file (at
least, I suppose he created it; I e-mailed him some time ago with the
question whether there was such a document. Now there is!)

- how are words separated? In the description it hints at splitting on
(white)space only. Is that true? Adlib has a complex scheme of
separators and concatenators, is nothing of the kind defined (at least
for the default context set)?

- is word proximity search required even for basic searches like 'author
= "Rembrandt van Rijn"' ? Adlib has no notion of proximity searches, so
even the most simple type of word search would be quite intricate to
program. Compared to that, the 'all' and 'any' searches are really
simple. 

- why is sorting defined on XPaths? This completely bypasses any
possible built-in sorting capability of any database server except one
delivering XML records natively. What I expect to have to do is:  +
retrieve every record  + convert them to adlibXML  + translate to the
right schema using an XSL  + call the XPath on each record 
 + sort on the outcome if this XPath
 + print the records in the resulting order (maybe even convert them
again if the retrieveSchema is different) .. pretty slow! Would it be
possible within the SRW standard to just supply an indexname (which in
Adlib as well as in relational databases systems is searchable as well
as sortable..) in stead of the XPath?

- is there an Open Source SRU/SRW tester (like
http://oai.dlib.vt.edu/cgi-bin/Explorer/oai2.0/testoai for OAI) or a
client that can be used to test our implementation? I only found servers
on the SRW website.

- the ZeeRex documentation is a bit concise on configInfo. What settings
exactly are 'setting', 'default' and 'supports'? And why would you want
to have a default stylesheet? That disables XML retrieval altogether, or
do I misinterpret something?

- the 'gentle CQL introduction' page contains a lot of broken links
(e.g. in section 4.2). Also, section 4.2 talks about 'srw' which has
become cql in version 1.1 if I'm not mistaken.

Apart from these questions and remarks I found the documentation pretty
clear and easy to work with. A bit sketchy sometimes, but that's much
better than having to crawl through extensively technical (e.g. W3C or
RFC) documentation!

Best regards,

Hedzer Westra, Systems Developer

Adlib | Information Systems
Reactorweg 291
3542 AD Utrecht
Postbus 1436
3600 BK Maarssen
tel: +31-30-241 1885
www: http://www.adlibsoft.com