I don't see any aggravation of this problem because of the hybrid
approach Bess is proposing. You've got enough flexibility in the way you
set up your Lucene index, and Lucene search results give you access to
the term weights for each hit, so you can tell which fields actually
matched.

There would probably be a lot of optimizations you could do within Solr
to help with this kind of thing. Art and I talked a little about this at
the ILS symposium: why not nestle the XML db inside Solr alongside
Lucene? Solr could then manage the indexing of the contents of the db,
and augment your search results with data from the db: you could get
full records as part of your search results without having to store them
in the Lucene index.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 3:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] code4lib lucene pre-conference

Bess Sadler wrote:
> application. That way you can use solr / lucene for search, faceted
> browse, etc, and your XML database only for known item retrieval,
> which it is generally able to do without performance issues. I'm
> hopping up and down waiting for someone to take this approach with an
> ILS, so please come and show us what you've got!
>
Would this approach complicate hilighting of hits-in-context?  One of
the biggest things missing from most current OPACs in my opinion is
google-style excerpting of WHAT part of the record matched the query--on
the results page. Many mainstream OPACs do currently provide some form
of hilighting on the detail/full-bib page, but it's not generally truly
identifying _which_ parts of the record _actually_ matched your search
(a search just on title will still hilight the word found in a non-title
field), which I find annoying.

Do these kind of hybrid approaches complicate the task of providing
proper result hilighting in context, or am I off on the wrong direction?

Jonathan


> Bess
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu