Automating Search Interfaces

[Sudarshan Purohit]

Peter Murray-Rust wrote :
> >.....
> >One solution may be to use DTD attributes to cue the search engines.
> >Perhaps a "LEVEL" attribute could cue the searchers to display
> >interfaces to predefined levels. The example below shows that the
> >"LEVEL" attribute means that the "numbeds" element should always .....


I'm rather new to this, so it's possible that i'm thinking wrongly...
Anyhow, I'd like to add one more point to this idea :

When we say that the hotel is making it's data available as XML on the 
web, what it will actually be doing is translating the data in it's
hotel
management database into XML, almost certainly through some Database-XML
interface. This will have to be done at very frequent intervals, in 
both directions, in order to show the latest status of , say, bookings.

	But doing this requires a standardised mechanism to delineate 
the XML elements as tables/columns/keys/other entities according to
their 
DBMS. I feel that this mechanism (say, having an attribute listing this
'level' ) should be worked out so as to facilitate web search engines as
well.

	XML-Data gives the basic features in this respect, by allowing
keys, etc. This could be built upon.
	 Any such XML should also be readable by other similar programs
(say by the software used by a travel agent who adds this into his own 
database) besides casual browsers.
	Does this sound reasonable? 


Sudarshan Purohit		18th feb 98
PSPL,Pune, India		1010hrs.

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)