Two questions: CQL - Weighting; Explain - Diagnostics

["Hammond, Tony" <t.hammond@nature.com>]

Hi:

Here's a couple oddball questions arising from implementing an SRU server:

    1. CQL - Weighting. I wondered if there had ever been any discussion on
weighting of indexes (or field "boosts" as it's called, I believe, in Lucene
queryparser syntax). This is one of the facets of search operation that we
are routinely managing. Previously this was very much in the background but
we are now foregrounding more so as to make it easier to test client
interfaces. And so, while we are weighting against content sections rather
than indexes as such, it seems pertinent to at least ask the question, given
that other search APIs (e.g. Lucene) do support this functionality.

    2. Explain - Diagnostics. One of the key functionalities of SRU beyond
structured queries and structured result sets is the standardization of a
diagnostics suite. And this is of real interest to any apps built on top of
SRU. (And currently we are building just such a one.) At present we only
have the diagnostics we support documented in the codebase itself, We could
(and should) document this separately. But the most obvious place to
document this would be the explain record. Is there any reason not to allow
for diagnostic codes supported by the server to be added to the explain
record since this is one of the principal features of the server?

Cheers,

Tony


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