ALEG

What I've done

• Advanced Search is now ready for testing. A few new attributes (source year, source work type) were added. There are now a total of 36 searchable attributes exposed over Agents and Works.

  Most of Friday was spent tuning the query construction mechanisms, as the variety of searches now possible (eg, "female indigeneous writers born between 1900 and 1940 who were published in "Quadrant" in the 1960's") has exposed further limits/fragilities in the Oracle Query Optimiser mechanisms, which isn't suprising. Queries now often span 25 to 30 table joins, and it is a very hard task for the query optimizer to find the most optimal access path to the data. So, my job is to provide it with as few distractions as possible!

• Creagh Cole advised some full text secondary material was now loaded on SETIS, so I added an attribute at the work level which causes a link to the material in SETIS (by BRN). Copyright issues have to be resolved before these links are made public by the stylesheet.

• Attended the Partner Meeting held on Wednesday.

• The system has been stable this week. Fran and I installed the "Sun-VTS" test and validation suite, but running it brought the system to a halt due to the stress testing making the machine very busy. Although it is claimed that VTS can run concurrently with a normal work load, we're not so sure. So, we're just waiting and watching...

Next Week

• Advanced Search testing and refinement following feedback

• Kerry and Annette have given me a long list of mostly minor tasks...

• William noticed that some of the place-of-publication data for loaded records is wrong where the name of the place of publication (town or city) occurs in more than one state (eg Richmond, Glebe). I'll investigate when we map the spatial thesaurus. Dan, Chris and Terry have also noticed similar incidents, so I think a very careful look at all place assignments to places occuring in multiple states/countries is warranted. (And Joan noticed Aberdeen NSW -v- Aberdeen Scotland!)

  I'll produce some reports/tools to help diagnose and correct these problems.

• Merge subjects

• Multiple creation events for a work as a mechanism for allowing date ranges to be associated with agents responsible for works, eg editors of a periodical.

• Off site backup procedures.

• Refining NBD Holdings searches.

• Manuscript holdings searches against RAAM and Guide to Literary Manuscripts.

• Subscriber database and public/subscriber access control.

Links of the week

• Knowledge Indignation: Road Rage on the Information Superhighway - ABC's Background Briefing, 12 August 2001

  "On the eighth day God created the Internet so that eventually everyone would know everything. But mankind didn't want to share, and created new technologies to control the miracle of the Internet, and knowledge became a commodity.

  Scientists are the first to rebel, and 26 000 have signed a petition. After the first of September 2001 they'll refuse to cooperate unless scientific knowledge is set free."

• The semantic web: How RDF will change learning technology standards - CETIS: the centre for educational technology interoperability standards