xml-dev - Re: xml search engine?

["John E. Simpson" <simpson@polaris.net>]

At 11:43 AM 3/29/2000 +0200, Reinout van Rees wrote:
>There is a problem I see for xml search engines. How are they going to
>cope with all the various DTD's? They ARE going to cope, but what will
>be the result? Will we have lots of small search engines searching for
>information in all reinforced_concrete_supplier.dtd xml files it can
>find and another for all medicine.dtd info? Will there be a few
>standard elements in most DTD's to comply to some emerging behaviour
>of all search engines?

You might want to look at goxml.com (http://www.goxml.com) for one approach 
to this problem. The engine searches for the search term(s) in XML 
documents that it knows about and returns you basically just a standard 
search-engine sort of listing of hits. However, down the left side of the 
page of hits is a listing of the XML element types in which it found any 
hits; you narrow the result set by selecting one of these element types, 
which provides a "context" of sorts when search terms might appear in more 
than one XML application. (Try "detour" as the search term to get a sense 
of how this works.)

IMO, this neatly sidesteps the problem of having to construct vertical 
search engines like you describe, leaving the selection of context up to 
the user.

================================================================
John E. Simpson          | "I was gratified to be able to answer
http://www.flixml.org    | promptly. I said I don't know."
simpson@polaris.net      | Mark Twain)



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