Practical Internet Groupware

An Implementation Plan

Given these ideas about a search-results structure, and its relationship to a URL namespace and a doctitle namespace, let’s plan and then implement a multidocbase, multiengine search system. We’ll start with the ProductAnalysis docbase that we’ve been working on for several chapters. To that we’ll add a second data component—an NNTP conferencing system that, we’ll suppose, is a less formal, less structured complement to the ProductAnalysis docbase. In its newsgroups, analysts can gather source materials, discuss work in progress, and share email that merits the attention of the group. In Chapter 13, we’ll look at how to set up this kind of NNTP-based intranet conferencing system. For now, we need only concern ourselves with the data store: a bunch of files that begin with the headers Newsgroups:, From:, Date:, and Subject:.

To begin, let’s enumerate the abstract markers we’ll use to organize search results, and map out the relationships between these markers and each of our two docbases (see Table 8.1).

Table 8-1. Mapping Docbase Elements to Abstract Markers

ProductAnalysis Docbase Elements	Abstract Markers	NNTP Conference Elements
Docbase	Type	conference
ProductAnalysis	Subtype	newsgroup
creation date	Date	date
analyst	Author	from
title	Title	subject
{summary}	Summary	{summary}
company
product

Only two mappings come for free. It’s quite clear which docbase elements should map to the abstract markers DATE and AUTHOR. A third ...