Lou> The user can select any of the 20 fields as being on or off.
Lou> The program will search for records and display those that are within the
Lou> date range and are in the selected categories. How can this be done
Lou> given the current implementation of WWW and others like it?
What you describe is (almost) exactly the way searches are performed in the
Hyper-G system. Unlike WWW or gopher, where the information provider has to
explicitly set up a search server for any collection of data that shall be
searchable, everything inserted into the Hyper-G system can immediately be
searched for.
Hyper-G Documents are contained in a hierarchy of so-called collections
(somewhat similar to a directory structure as provided by gopher). The user may
'activate' any desired set of collections for search operations. The search will
then return only documents that are found in the active collections (and their
subcollections, recursively).
If you want to give it a try, rlogin or telnet to 'finfo.tu-graz.ac.at' as user
'info', activate some collections with the 'ac(tivate)' command and perform a
simple search with the 'fi(nd) o(bject)' command. You may see a list of active
collections using the 'sh(ow active colls)' command and deactivate them with
'd(eactivate)'. For the user's convenience, it is sufficient to position the
cursor on a collection and issuing the 'find object' command in order to search
a single collection. To activate the whole document space, you may enter
'p(arents)' to get to the root collection and perform the seacrh from there.
Admittedly, the user interface for searches as it is now is kind of complicated
and for the more experienced users. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.
Keyword searches are currently performed only in the title of the document and
additional keywords. Full text search is currently not available, due to
problems with the WAIS server responsible for this. Also, please apologize the
absence of English manpages for the commands described above. If you are fluent
in German, however, you may switch the system to German saying 'la(nguage)
g(erman)' and have the full documentation available.
Frank
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Frank M. Kappe fkappe@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at
Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media (IICM)
Graz University of Technology, Austria
Voice: ++43/316/832551-22 Fax: ++43/316/824394
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