The following definitions, from Z39.50 Attribute Architecture, Version 1.1, July 9, 1999, are included here to provide a context for the development of the Bib-2 Attribute Set.
1. Access Point The Access Point attribute defines either an intellectual access point (for applications that work with abstract database definitions) or an access point corresponding to a database field name (for applications where searching is defined in conjunction with a specific database schema, or defined to correspond to a specific Z39.50 tag set).
2. Semantic Qualifier and Functional Qualifier The Semantic Qualifier and Functional Qualifier types correspond to "type" and "role" respectively. The Semantic Qualifier describes the term itself, while the Functional Qualifier describes the relationship of the term to the object being searched. For example, consider a search on an author, where the author is a person and thus the term is a personal name. The Access Point attribute value would be 'name', the Semantic Qualifier value would be 'personal name' and the Functional Qualifier value would be 'author'.
3. Language The attribute indicates the language of the search term.
4. Content Authority This attribute indicates the source of the search term.
5. Expansion/Interpretation This attribute may be used to indicate, for example, that thesaural expansion, singular/plural matching, part of speech qualification, phonetic matching, case sensitivity, stemming, truncation (including left and/or right anchored as well as word-by-word truncation), or various loose forms of phrase matching, should be used in the query evaluation. No values are defined for this attribute in this attribute set.
6. Normalized Weight The value of this attribute is the weight of the operand (in a weighted boolean query). No use is defined for this attribute in this attribute set.
7. Hit Count The value of this attribute is the number of records satisfying the operand. No use is defined for this attribute in this attribute set.
8. Comparison The Comparison attribute defines the relationship between the term in the operand and the term in the term list at the server. This attribute set uses values defined in the Utility Attribute Set.
9. Format/Structure This attribute is used primarily to help with the interpretation of a character-string term; it provides guidance for the datatype conversion process.
10. Occurrence The value if this attribute is the desired occurrence of an access point. For example "second occurrence of field-1".
11. Indirection The presence of this attribute indicates that the actual content of the term is not supplied, but instead, a pointer (e.g. url) to the term is supplied in lieu of the actual term. No use is defined for this attribute in this attribute set.