microqueries
Oct 29th, 2005 by Phil Dawes
I’ve recently been experimenting with ways to provide simpler structured searching/querying to ‘normal’ web users (i.e. not techies). Sparql/SQL querying doesn’t cut it here - we need something simpler.
One approach I’ve been trying is allowing simple query constraints in with the text search facility. Using the proximity searching capability JAM*VAT then finds a collection of symbols that match all the constraints in close proximity.
E.g. the search: “danny ayers >2005-10-25 <2005-10-27”
..brings back subjects linked to the words ‘danny’ and ‘ayers’ and any dates between 2005-10-25 and 2005-10-27 - in this case it finds blog posts made between these dates.
N.B. you may need to tweak the dates a bit in the above example if you’re reading this later than october 2005.
Phil, where you find the Sparql / SQL approach doesn’t cut if for you (and it never has for me), you might find the Versa equivalent more palpable. It’s written with the RDF model in mind and is influenced by more recent precedent than SQL (REGEX and XPath)
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versa