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.. _common-concepts:
Common Concepts
===============
The description of concepts you will encounter here and there in the
Invenio. Our interpretation may differ from the practice found in
other products, so please read this carefully.
1. sysno - (ALEPH|old) system number
Stands for (ALEPH|old) system number only. Which means that, for
outside-CERN Invenio installations, stands for an 'old system
number' whatever it is, if they want to publicise it instead of our
internal auto-incremented Invenio record identifiers.
2. recID - Invenio record identifier
Each record has got an auto-incremented ID in the "bibrec" table
(formerly called "bibitem"). This is the basic "record identifier"
concept in Invenio.
3. docID - eventual fulltext document identifier
Each fulltext file may have eventual docID. This will permit us to
interconnect records (recID) with fulltext files (docID), if we
want to. At the moment there is only one-way connection from recID
to docID via HTTP field 856. This is ugly. I think we may
probably profit by introducing recID-docID relationship in several
ways: file protection, reference extraction, fulltext
indexing... (?!)
4. field - logical field concept such as "reportnumber"
A bibliographic record is composed of 'fields' such as title or
author. Note that we consider 'field' to be a logical concept,
that is compound and may consist of several physical MARC fields.
For example, "report number" field consists of several MARC fields
such as 088 $a, 037 $a, 909C0 $r. Another example: "first report
number" consist of only one MARC field, 037 $a.
5. tag - physical field concept such as "088 $a".
Having defined the concept of 'logical field', let's now turn to
the 'physical field' that denotes basically the concept of 'MARC
field' as defined in MARC-21 standard. In addition to tag, a field
may contain two identifiers to describe the data content, and
subfield codes to denote various parts of the content. See our
HOWTO MARC guide on this.
Thus said, in the implementation of our bibliographic tables
(bibXXx) we have sort of generalized the term 'tag' to stand for::
tag = tag code + identifier1 + identifier2 + subfield code
This convention, while taking some freedom from the MARC-21
standard, enables us to write things like "field: base number, tag:
909C0b, value: 11". If this interpretation is indeed too free with
respect to the standard usage of terms, we may change them in the
future.
6. collection - here we distinguish (i) primary collection concept
and (ii) specific collection concept.
The (i) primary collections are basic organizational structure of
how the records are grouped together in collections. The primary
collections are used in the navigable search interface under the
'Narrow search' box. The (ii) specific collections present an
orthogonal view on the data organization, that is useful to group
together some records from different primary collections, if they
present a common pattern. The specific collections are used in the
search interface under the 'Focus on' box.
The primary collections are defined mainly by the collection
identifier ("980 $a,b"); and the specific collections are as
defined by any query that is possible for a search engine to
execute (see also "dbquery" column in the "collection" table).
In the past we used to use the term "catalogue", that is now
deprecated, and that can be interchanged with "collection".
7. doctype - stands for web document type concept, used in WebSubmit
The "document type" is used solely for submission purposes, and
fulltext access purposes ("setlink"-like). For example, a document
type "photo" may be used in many collections such as "Foo Photos",
"Bar PhotoLab", etc. Similarly, one collection can cover several
doctypes. (M:N relationship)
8. baskets, alerts, settings - covering personal features
Denote personal features, for which we previously used the terms
"shelf" and "profile" that are now deprecated.
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