[Koha] Question about searching

[MJ Ray]

Many search systems seem to be evolving a common syntax, with
double quotes around terms which should appear consecutively,
a dash in front of a term to exclude it and a single-attribute
search to have the attribute name and a colon in front of the
term. For example:

  children subject:"social science" -author:Smith

to find items about children with a subject of social science
not authored by anyone called Smith.

Is there a formal name or description for this syntax?

I don't even know whether I should be reading language processing
or information retrieval or information filtering literature
to find this.  Web searching has been useless, as usual for
learning about searching!

This arose at yesterday's search meeting. I hope the facilitator
will organise a summary for koha-devel soon. I can see the
attraction of CQL, especially for interserver communication, but
I think it gets too hard too fast for general end-user searches.
I'd like to have something well-defined to propose instead.

Thanks for any help.
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
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