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Re: Re: XML Search Engines

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Re: XML Search Engines
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 10:52:53 -0400
• In-reply-to: <17.3883798a.2bd2b79d@a...>

AndrewWatt2000@a... writes:
>Is the conclusion from what you say that you view XML-based search
>engines as a fantasy? And an undesirable fantasy at that?
>
>To put my question another way, how do you see it as being practical
>or desirable to make progress from the current state of the art of Web
>search strategies? Does XML have a role in your view?

Labeled information is generally easier to work with than unlabeled
data, so sure, there's a role for XML in searching.  The usefulness of
those labels seems far greater on a small scale (XPath expressions for
extracting info, for instance, or querying one department or one
corporation's information) than on a large scale, where multiple
vocabularies and multiple uses of those vocabularies complicate matters
quickly.

There's plenty of "progress" there to be made on a small to medium, and
that's why I consider things like RDF important.  I just don't consider
them general solutions to all my XML problems, nor do I think that
ontology-building is a magic answer to all our search engine questions.

Is there an 80/20 point?  I think there probably are many, but also
suspect that the 20 moves out rapidly as the scale of the data and the
number of possible questions increases.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

• References:
  • Re: Re: XML Search Engines
    • From: AndrewWatt2000@a...

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