[Wasabi Proposal] XML desktop query language

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

Fabrice Colin writes:
 > On 1/17/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
 > > Regarding the user-level language now. Perhaps "flying Dutchman" would
 > > mean the unstemmed phrase (if supported), and 'flying Dutchman'
 > > (single quotes) could allow for stemming. This is not completely
 > > standard, but it doesn't break user expectation in horrible ways (as
 > > far as I can see).
 > >
 > I think it does. Double quotes usually express a phrase search.  My
 > opinion is we'd better leave stemming (and diacritic sensitivity) out
 > and let each back-end play its specific strengths as it likes to find
 > the best matches.

When the user is searching for a specific form of a word (typically for a
proper noun), he usually knows it. This is an important and basic piece of
meta-information which the simple query language should be able to express
as it can vastly improve results.

The natural thing to do is to use capitalization (capitalized terms are
searched as is), but this conflicts with case-sensitive searches if we
really want them.

I do not like the single quote solution that much, one reason being that
single quotes sometimes make sense in words (O'Donnell).

Spotlight allows adding search modifiers as letters after a double-quoted
expression, like: "someword"cdw where c, d, w control case/diacritic
sensitivity and whole word matching. This seems like a good solution. Is
there a risk that this might be patented and does anyone know how to do a
patent check ? 

jfd