WAIT 1.6 Copyright (c) 1996, Ulrich Pfeifer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms than Perl itself. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This software is not actively maintained by it's author. For more two years now I tried to steal some time to clean this up without any luck. So I decided to pass the baton on. I consider the input part pretty satisfying. The query part - despite being operable and useful - needs a major overhaul. To provide a forum for further discussions an to coordinate further developement, I did setup a mailinglist. Drop me a line if you want to participate. Ulrich Pfeifer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME WAIT - a rewrite of the freeWAIS-sf engine in Perl Status of this document I started writing down some information about the implementation before I forget them in my spare time. The stuff is incomplete at least. Any additions, corrections, ... welcome. PURPOSE As you might know, I developed and maintained freeWAIS-sf (with the help of many people in The Net). FreeWAIS-sf is based on freeWAIS maintained by the Clearing House for Network Information Retrieval (CNIDR) which in turn is based on wais-8- b5 implemented by Thinking Machine et al. During this long history - implementation started about 1989 - many people contributed to the distribution and added features not foreseen by the original design. While the system fulfills its task now, the code has reached a state where adding new features is nearly impossible and even fixing longstanding bugs and removing limitations has become a very time consuming task. Therefore I decided to pass the maintenance to WSC Inc. and built a new system from scratch. For obvious reasons I choosed Perl as implementation language. DESCRIPTION The central idea of the system is to provide a framework and the building blocks for any indexing and search system the users might want to build. Obviously the framework limits the class of system which can be build. +------+ +-----+ +------+ ==> |Access| ==> |Parse| ==> | | +------+ +-----+ | | || | | +-----+ || |Filter| ==> |Index| \/ | | +-----+ +-------+ +-----+ | | <= |Display| <== |Query| <-> | | +-------+ +-----+ +------+ A collection (aka table) is defined by the instances of the access and parse module together with the filter definitions. At query time in addition a query and a display module must be choosen. Access The access module defines which documents where members of a database. Usually an access module is a tied hash, whose keys are the Ids of the documents (did = document id) and whose values are the documents themselves. The indexing process loops over the keys using `FIRSTKEY' and `NEXTKEY'. Documents are retrieved with `FETCH'. By convention access modules should be members of the `WAIT::Document' hierarchy. Have a look at the `WAIT::Document::Split' module to get the idea. Parse The task parse module is to split the documents into logical parts via the `split' method. E.g. the `WAIT::Parse::Nroff' splits manuals piped through nroff(1) into the sections *name*, *synopsis*, *options*, *description*, *author*, *example*, *bugs*, *text*, *see*, and *environment*. Here is the implementation of `WAIT::Parse::Base' which handes documents with a pretty simple tagged format: AU: Pfeifer, U.; Fuhr, N.; Huynh, T. TI: Searching Structured Documents with the Enhanced Retrieval Functionality of freeWAIS-sf and SFgate ER: D. Kroemker BT: Computer Networks and ISDN Systems; Proceedings of the third International World-Wide Web Conference PN: Elsevier PA: Amsterdam - Lausanne - New York - Oxford - Shannon - Tokyo PP: 1027-1036 PY: 1995 sub split { # called as method my %result; my $fld; for (split /\n/, $_[1]) { if (s/^(\S+):\s*//) { $fld = lc $1; } $result{$fld} .= $_ if defined $fld; } return \%result; } Since the original document cannot be reconstructed from its attributes, we need a second method (*tag*) which marks the regions of the document with tags for the different attributes. This tagged form is used by the display module to hilight search terms in the documents. Besides the tags for the attributes, the method might assign the special tags `_b' and `_i' for indicating bold and italic regions. sub tag { my @result; my $tag; for (split /\n/, $_[1]) { next if /^\w\w:\s*$/; if (s/^(\S+)://) { push @result, {_b => 1}, "$1:"; $tag = lc $1; } if (defined $tag) { push @result, {$tag => 1}, "$_\n"; } else { push @result, {}, "$_\n"; } } return @result; # we don't go for speed } Obviously one could implement `split' via `tag'. The reason for having two functions is speed. We need to call `split' for each document when indexing a collection. Therefore speed is essential. On the other hand, `tag' is called in order to display a single document and may be a little slower. It may care about tagging bold and italic regions. See `WAIT::Parse::Nroff' how this might decrease performance. Filter definition From the Information Retrieval perspective, the hardest part of the system is the filter module. The database administrator defines for each attribute, how the contents should be processed before it is stored in the index. Usually the processing contains steps to restrict the character set, case transformation, splitting to words and transforming to word stems. In WAIT these steps are defined naturally as a pipeline of processing steps. The pipelines are made up by functions in the package WAIT::Filter which is pre-populated by the most common functions but may be extended any time. The equivalent for a typical freeWAIS-sf processing would be this pipeline: [ 'isotr', 'isolc', 'split2', 'stop', 'Stem'] The function `isotr' replaces unknown characters by blanks. `isolc' transforms to lower case. `split2' splits into words and removes words shorter than two characters. `stop' removes the freeWAIS-sf stopwords and `Stem' applies the Porter algorithm for computing the stem of the words. The filter definition for a collection defines a set of piplines for the attributes and modifies the pipelines which should be used for prefix and interval searches. Here is a complete example: my $stem = [{ 'prefix' => ['unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc'], 'intervall' => ['unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc'], },'unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc', 'split2', 'stop', 'Stem']; my $text = [{ 'prefix' => ['unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc'], 'intervall' => ['unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc'], }, 'unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc', 'split2', 'stop']; my $sound = ['unroff', 'isotr', 'isolc', 'split2', 'Soundex']; my $spec = [ 'name' => $stem, 'synopsis' => $stem, 'bugs' => $stem, 'description' => $stem, 'text' => $stem, 'environment' => $text, 'example' => $text, 'example' => $stem, 'author' => $sound, 'author' => $stem, ]