A processing instruction for robots

[Amanda Xu]

Do you expect the end-user to understand 
term weighting techniques as well as the 
structure of an XML document?

Elephant

-----Original Message-----
From: Walter Underwood [mailto:wunder at infoseek.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 1999 3:04 PM
To: Dongwook Shin
Cc: 'XML developers' list'
Subject: Re: A processing instruction for robots


At 01:41 PM 12/9/99 -0500, Dongwook Shin wrote:
>Walter Underwood wrote:
>> Structural markup opens up some really nice possibilities.
>> An indexer might weight the bibliography less and the
>> abstract more, for example.
>
>If you see XRS (XML retrieval system), you can find that a user
>can give a bigger weight to an element than to another. This
>kind of weighting is more flexible than those by indexer.
>Check XRS Web demonstration system:
>http://dlb2.nlm.nih.gov/~dwshin/xrs.html

I think you are suggesting that wighting and selection
should be done at query time instead of at index time.
That is a design tradeoff for the search engine. But the
detailed weighting and selection belong *somewhere* in
the search engine rather than in every single document.

I can imagine a system where each document had indexing
hints scattered throughout the structure, but I can't
imagine anyone having the time or knowledge to do a good
job with all that markup. We have enough trouble getting
people to replace "Untitled Document" in the <title> element
in HTML.

wunder
--
Walter R. Underwood
Senior Staff Engineer
Infoseek Software
GO Network, part of The Walt Disney Company
wunder at infoseek.com
http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product)
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946

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