ALEG
Weekly Report - Week 25, 20 October 2000
What I've done
- I had a cold this week, went home early most days and so wasn't as productive as I'd hoped...
- Added a column to the database table which stores titles to
support better "exact name" matching. This column holds a "normalised"
version of the title with punctuation, spaces, "AND", "THE", "AN", "A" removed
- Met with Judith and James from the NLA on Use Case for the external system
interactions, especially interaction with the ALEG search system and the
retrieval of holdings data from Kinetica using a query layered on top of Z39.50.
- More implementation of the web based infrastructure, including a simple
prototype search form which actually executes a search and brings back results.
This prototype is very rough and intended just to test the infrastructure, not
User Interface elements, but it is nice to see something coming back from the
database (even if it isn't nicely formatted!).
Even this simple interface raises some interesting issues, such as "what to do
if someone asks for all works written by men?" The results of such a simple
query are unlikely to be useful on their own (?), but maybe this could be
a legitimate if poor first query in a step-wise query refinement. Should we limit
the number of records returned? Should any limit be different for paying
and non-paying customers? I suppose as long as no queries "break" the system
of consume lots of resources, and are delivered quickly (or at least incrementally)
to the user, it doesn't really matter...?
What I haven't done but need to do soon!
- Document how ALEG will handle some tricky cases - The "Poets of the
Month" works from the mid 1970's and "Down the Lake with Half a Chook".
These are amongst the most "difficult" cases Tessa and Kathy can
come up with, so if we think the proposed data model can handle these,
we'll be happy!
Next week
- Work out with Kerry the approach we'll take BAL data loading
- Continuing work on the web-specific infrastructure: database interaction, XML generation,
XML translation (initially into HTML) and HTML delivery components.
- Exchange email with Judith and James proposing some Java interfaces
to define the boundary with the Z39.50 holdings information retrieval subsystem.
Summary