Replacing the Dienst built-in search engine

The system assumes that bibliographic data is available in RFC 1807-formatted ASCII bibliography files. However, the only RFC 1807 specific code in the server is in the file Indexer/parse_bib_file.pl. It would not be difficult to use a different bibliography format, as long as the supported search fields (described below) are present in that format.

All communication between the server and the search engine flows through the subroutines in the file Indexer/indexer_interface.pl. The components of the interface are described below. Using a new search engine would require replacing the calls within these subroutines to the Dienst database engine with semantically equivalent calls to the new search engine.

Tagged_Search

Description: Perform a fielded search on the database. The input is an associative array whose keys are the fields to search on and the values are the search criteria for the respective field. The supported fields are:

• publisher - a string that specifies the publisher of matching documents. A match is successful if the input value matches a leading sub-string of the documents publisher (e.g. "CO" matches "COLUMBIA" and "CORNELL").
• number - a string that specifies the document name of matching documents. A match is successful if the input value matches any sub-string of the document's name (e.g. "94" matches "94-1418" and "68-194").
• author - a string that specifies authors' first or last name or names of a matching document (see the rules for bibliographic keyword matching below).
• title - a string that specifies words in the title of a matching document (see the rules for bibliographic keyword matching below).
• abstract - a string that specifies words in the abstract of a matching document (see the rules for bibliographic keyword matching below).
• any - a string that specifies words each of the bibliographic keyword fields (i.e. title, abstract, and author). Thus any=foo is equivalent to author=foo, title=foo, abstract=foo.

Rules for bibliographic keyword matching - Words in the three bibliographic keyword fields (author, title, abstract) are matched to bibliographic entries according to the following rules:

• Each word matches any word in the respective field that begins with respective word. For example, the word "comp" matches "computer", "computation", "comprehensive", etc.
• The value for a keyword field may contain the logical connectors "and" and "or". For example, "robotics or vision" in the abstract field, will return documents that have the word "robotics" or "vision" in their abstracts. "robotics and vision" in the abstract field, will return documents that have both the word "robotics" and "vision" in their abstracts. Multiple words that are not separated by "and" are assumed to be "and" separated. For example, "computer vision" in the abstract field, will return documents that have both the words "computer" and "vision" in their abstracts. Finally, parentheses may be used to group words. For example, "Gries or (Teitelbaum and Field)" in the author field, will return documents authored by "Gries" or by "Teitelbaum" and "Field".
• Finally, the input to the subroutine may specify either the logical connector AND or OR between the bibliographic keyword fields (the default is AND). For example, oring "robot" in the Title field and "robotics" in the abstract field will return documents that have either "robot" in their titles or "robotics" in their abstracts. anding these fields will return only those documents that have "robot" in their titles and "robotics" in their abstracts.

Arguments:

• list - a reference to an array that will be filled with a sorted list of the docids that match the search criteria.
• terms - an associative array where keys are the fields to be searched and values are the search criteria for the respective fields (as described above).
• and - a boolean which is true if the criteria in terms should be "and"ed together and false if the criteria should be "or"ed together.

Returns: a string that is a status message if errors occurred in the search.

Get_Bib_Data

Description: Get bibliographic data for a document.

Arguments:

• fields - a reference to an associative array whose keys correspond to the bibliographic fields to be returned. The supported bibliographic fields are:
  • TITLE - the title of the document.
  • AUTHOR - the author(s) of the document (multiple authors are separated by a colon (:).
  • ABSTRACT - the abstract of the document.
  • DATE - the entry data of the bibliography record.
  • NOTES - any descriptive notes about the document.
  Each element of the associate array is set to the corresponding untranslated entry in the bibliographic record.
• docid - a string which is the document identifier of the document for which data is to be retrieved.

Returns: a string that is a status message if errors occurred in the retrieval.

Get_All_IDs

Description: Get a list of all the docids in the database sorted in lexigraphic order.

Arguments

• list - a reference to an array that will be filed with a sorted list of the docids.

Returns: a string that is a status message if errors occurred.

Get_All_Authors

Description: Get a list of all author names in the database, order is undefined.

Arguments

• list - a reference to an array that will be filed with the list of author names.

Returns: a string that is a status message if errors occurred.

Get_Indexer_Status

Description: Return an HTML document describing the status of the indexer (number of records, etc.). The contents and format of this status document is undefined, it is simply displayed.

Arguments

• string - a reference to string that will be filled in with the HTML status document.

Returns: none

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