I think this could be done well at the application level, above the Catalog if done right, but one would have to have good synonym translation table specific to their application. I do this in an application using a TinyTable with translation information for abbreviations (i.e. VW printed in a classified auto ad gets expanded to Volkswagen, so people can search for both)... If there was any sort of thesaurus database of sorts available to your application, I suppose, in theory, one could do some synonym-oriented indexing, profided that you index a method that brute-force weights the real words by outputting them a greater factor of times than the synonym (i.e. index a method that outputs the original text 3 times and synonyms for the meaningful words (non-stop words) in that text perhaps once. This is not difficult from a development perspective, but involves having synonym data and deciding what words should be translated to their synonyms, and what ones should not. I think the real issue here is not having a database of synonyms - and, at that, you would have to have one for whatever language(s) you needed to support. Sean -----Original Message----- From: Dieter Maurer [mailto:dieter@handshake.de] Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 1:24 PM To: Dirk Datzert Cc: zope-dev@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] Searching Dirk Datzert writes:

I'm looking for a search tool which can do semantic/synonym search.

Can this be done via ZCatalog ? Not out of the box.

You could place something before ZCatalog (which parses subquerie for search term and expands them into a set of synonyms). But you would need to work quite hard to get true semantic search... Dieter _______________________________________________ Zope-Dev maillist - Zope-Dev@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )