Re: freeWAIS Multiformat type and WWW front end

David Crossley (davidc@erin.gov.au)
Tue, 5 Apr 94 19:46:19 EST


Marc Andreesen writes on Mon, 4 Apr 94:

> David Crossley writes:
> > We do not store our metadata in text files but in an RDBMS. So we
> > do not have any text files to index. As far as I can see the only
> > solution is to run a cron job every few days to generate metadata
> > text files from the RDBMS for each dataset and index these.
> >
> > Another solution may be to create a text file for each dataset of
> > likely keywords, index these and then somehow intercept the query
> > with either a WAIS server script or a WWW server script. Does
> > anyone know if this would be possible?

> The latter should be possible if you're going through a sufficiently
> smart and customized WAIS/WWW gateway. In other words, the gateway
> has to be smart enough to map WAIS search hits to some representation
> of files in the RDBMS; a parallel WWW script would then need to be
> able to reach inside the database upon receiving a query for such a
> representation. I think that's how it would work...

So as not to assume that the WAIS request is always coming from a WWW client
I will probably do all this with a WAIS gateway and WAIS server scripts.
I hope that I can get it smart enough to then regenerate metadata files when
a hit is made. Then these could be picked up by the Multiformat Opportunity
of the client. These metadata files would then be regularly re-indexed
rather than do the keywords caper.

cheers
David

---
David Crossley
ERIN - Environmental Resources Information Network - Australia
davidc@erin.gov.au