The ROADS Frequently Asked Questions List (FAQ)
Version: $Id: roadsfaq.html,v 1.14 1997/03/11 17:17:12 lisap Exp $
Overview
This is the Frequently Asked Questions document about ROADS,
Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based Services.
Table of Contents
1) Introduction
1.1) Conventions
1.2) Where can I get the ROADS FAQ?
2) What is ROADS?
2.1) How is the ROADS software used?
2.2) Where can I get the ROADS software?
2.3) How is ROADS funded?
2.4) Glossary
3) Administrator Questions
4) User Questions
5) Miscellaneous Questions
6) Other Resources
7) Authorship
7.1) Acknowledgements
7.2) Permissions
1) Introduction
1.1) Conventions
-
Direct quotations begin with an attribution in a standard format,
and are indented.
-
Pointers to resources available via the Web, including references
to FTPable goodies, appear as URLs.
For example:
<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/>
-
You'll occasionally see text in braces, like this.
{ Here is some example meta-text. }
Sometimes, this indicates a place where information is missing, or
where the information may be unreliable, or where major changes are
planned in the near future. You can ignore these if you're just
looking for information. But if you can help fill in the gaps, and
you want to achieve fame, fortune, and your name at the bottom of
this FAQ, please send e-mail to the maintainer.
1.2) Where can I get the ROADS FAQ?
2) What is ROADS?
2.1) How is the ROADS software used?
ROADS has four main objectives:
-
to make a significant contribution to the development of a
sharable, distributed systems platform for resource discovery
services
-
to support emerging subject based services with tools, advice and
guidelines
-
to work with subject based services to involve information
providers in the description of their own resources, in order to
make them as useful and accessible as possible
-
to implement and test emerging standards and to improve UK
participation in international standards making activity.
2.2) Where can I get the ROADS software?
If you think you might be interested in using the ROADS software for your own
project / research / needs
contact the ROADS liaison officer
on:
- Email:
roads-liaison@bristol.ac.uk
- Tel: 0117 928 8478
- Fax: 0117 928 8473
- Post: ROADS Liaison, ILRT, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road,
Bristol BS8 1TN
{ Notes on availability, licencing, etc. to be supplied }
2.3) How is ROADS funded?
ROADS is a development project funded by the UK Higher Education Funding
Councils via the Information Services Sub-Committee (ISSC) of the Joint
Information Systems Committee. It is part of the
Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib),
set up as a result of the
Follett Report,
which is steered by the Follett
Implementation Group on IT (FIGIT).
ROADS fits into the
ANR (Access to Network Resources)
section of eLib.
2.4) Glossary
Every subculture needs its list of buzzwords and
acronyms. Here's a collection for ROADS.
| I18N |
Internationalisation ('I', followed by 18 letters, followed by 'N').
|
| IAFA templates |
|
| MIME |
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions - RFC 1521
|
| RFC |
request for comments; proposed or standard Internet protocols
|
| URL |
WWW uniform resource locator; access-method://host/path
|
| WHOIS++ |
a distributed directory protocol
|
| WWW |
the worldwide web
|
3) Administrator Questions
3.1) What technical documentation exists for ROADS?
The ROADS technical report archive is at
<URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Reports/>
3.2) What ROADS releases are available? Where can I get them?
Which version do I use for a production service?
You can find information on ROADS availability and release status on the
software distribution pages
<URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/>
ROADS v 0.25 is the current production version. However ROADS v 1 offers
much more functionality that v 0.25 so in general we'd recommend
that sites wanting to use ROADS use that version instead.
3.3) Is there a ROADS bug list?
This information is also available from the software distribution pages.
You can go directly to the ROADS v1 bug tracking page for information on
the status of ROADS v1 bugs
<URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/bugtrack1.0.html>
3.4) How does relevancy ranking work?
The ranking all happens in lib/rank.pl. This piece of Perl takes the
query and the templates handles that have been matched by the search
mechanism. It first removes all booleans, WHOIS++ constraints, punctuation
and other guff from the query string. It then cycles over all the
templates handles and looks for occurances of each term in the munged
query in each line of the template. A counter is incremented for each
match and at the end of the template the handle is placed in a hashed
array with a key equal to this count (there maybe handles with this key
already; if so the handle is appended to the existing list).
Once all the templates have been checked, a normal array is built by doing
a reverse sort on the keys of this hashed array (so that the largest
counts, i.e. most hits, come first) and pushing the handles from the hash
array's values on the normal array. This array is then returned for use
by the rendering routines.
Note that if you wish you can put your own ranking algorithm in place by
replacing lib/rank.pl with your own Perl routine. The subroutine must be
called "rank" and must take arguments of the query string and a list of
unranked result handles. It must return a list of rank result handles
(the lists are normal Perl arrays).
Answer supplied by: Jon Knight <jon@net.lut.ac.uk>, February 1997
3.5) How do I set up multiple databases under ROADS version 1?
First it is important to remember that there is no support for real
multiple databases under ROADS version 1. However you can enable multiple
logical databases by making use of the 'Destination' attribute in ROADS
templates. The following steps should get things going.
Essentially the value of the 'Destination' attribute is the 'name' of the
logical database. For the purposes of this example we'll assume that all
records will go into one of two logical databases, 'Biology' or
'Biochemistry'.
-
Make sure that there is a 'Destination' attribute listed for every
template type in the 'config/outlines' directory.
-
Update any existing records in your database, giving them each a
'Destination' attribute value of either 'Biology' or 'Biochemistry'.
-
It is important to remember that there is no way of explicitly
searching for records with an empty 'Destination' attribute (though you
can search for 'ALL' records) so normally you will want to add a
'Destination' to every record that you create. To enforce this you may
want to make the 'Destination' attribute mandatory and offer a selection
of values for it at template creation time. To do this update each of the
files in the 'config/outlines' directory making the 'Destination' lines
look something like this:
Destination:::Biology|Biochemistry:m:
-
Configure the two logical databases by updating the 'config/databases'
file. Typically this file will contain a single entry. Something like
ROADS TEST SERVER:roads.ukoln.ac.uk:6663::roadsukolnacuk01
This single entry should be replaced with two (or more) entries:
Biology:roads.ukoln.ac.uk:6663:Biology:roadsukolnacuk01
Biochemistry:roads.ukoln.ac.uk:6663:Biochemistry:roadsukolnacuk01
-
Make sure that the 'Destination' attribute is listed as one of the
searchable attributes for each of the template types listed in
'config/search-restrict'.
-
Re-index your database:
bin/mkinv.pl -a
Finally, use your Web browser to bring up the 'cgi-bin/search.pl' search
screen. You should now be presented with, and be able to search, multiple
databases.
Answer supplied by: Andy Powell <a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk>, September 1996
3.6) What template types are there?
Michael Day at UKOLN is in the process of creating a registry of ROADS
template types at:
<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/templates/>
Answer supplied by: Andy Powell <a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk>, February 1997
3.7) Is it safe to have several people updating a ROADS database at the same time?
3.8) I seem to be having some problems with standard UNIX commands because
my ROADS 'source' directory is so big?
3.8)
4) User Questions
5) Miscellaneous Questions
5.1) Why IAFA templates?
Based on IAFA but now referred to as ROADS templates or WHOIS++ templates.
Simple, flexible, easy to use metadata format - same as the 'on the wire'
format delivered by WHOIS++.
5.2) Why WHOIS++?
Seemed like a good choice at the time! Now looks like LDAP might possibly
have been a better choice (everyone, including Microsoft and Netscape seem
to be going down the LDAP route) - but still not absolutely clear that is
the case. WHOIS++ and CIP (Common Indexing Protocol - which provides
query routing) will provide good solution to distributed searching.
LDAP and CIP will happen but probably later than with WHOIS++?
The ROADS software takes a
toolkit approach.
This allows, for example,
reasonably easy conversion between different formats
of metadata.
If necessary it would be possible to
rip out WHOIS++ server and replace with LDAP - leaving other
ROADS tools in place.
5.3) How big can a ROADS database be?
This is not clear yet but is being investigated.
The answer will obviously
depend on complexity and size of records as well as simply on the number
of records. If necessary it is possible to rip out the ROADS database and slot in,
say, an Oracle database behind the ROADS WHOIS++ server using the ROADS
API. Again, this is a feature of the toolkit approach.
5.4) How configurable is the ROADS user interface?
Very flexible. Most of the HTML generated by the ROADS software is based
on configurable skeleton files - including the rendering of search
results. Compare results from the
eLib project database,
SOSIG and
ADAM for example.
There is no reason why skeleton files couldn't contain JavaScript and make use of
cookies to configure the output further - though I don't think
anyone is doing this yet.
ROADS also contains support for I18N based on client
supplied HTTP headers.
6) Other Resources
Web pages, mailing lists, DESIRE, NWI, SOSIG, ADAM, EEVL, etc, eLib.
Services using ROADS:
-
ADAM
-
Biz/Ed
-
IHR-Info
-
OMNI
-
SOSIG
-
UKOLN/eLib
7) Authorship
The layout of this FAQ was based on the MMDF FAQ.
Answers have been taken from existing ROADS Web pages and from various
questions and answers sent to the roads-liaison, open-roads and
cousns mailing lists.
The ROADS FAQ's current maintainer is Andy Powell <a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk>.
7.1) Acknowledgements
Contributions to this FAQ have come from:
John Kirrimuir, Jon Knight, Andy Powell
{ Your name and, optionally, e-mail address or URL, could be here! }
7.2) Permissions
Permission is granted for unlimited redistribution of the unedited
ROADS FAQ.