[Zope-dev] Searching

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

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

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