[Sigia-l] search results and thesauri

[Chris Farnum]

Michael-

I like the ideas from Mags and Ziya about preferred
terms and synonyms.  Clearly there are circumstances
where you could overwhelm your users with a bloated
and confusing results list if you have extensive lists
of synonyms.  Some thesaurus-friendly search
interfaces have an "explode" feature for broadening a
search out to the synonyms and related terms.

Mags make a nice case for having preferred terms or
"used for" relationships in your thesaurus.  You
wouldn't want to show an error message or no results
if the user entered "cats" instead of "felines."  In
this situation, you are probably doing the user a
favor by pointing out immediately in the results set
that felines is the preferred term and showing them
the results (with highlighting for felines included). 
In this way you can anticipate the user's needs and
give her/him results instead of slowing them down with
an extra decision point or errors.

But if you are truly dealing with synonyms as Ziya
suggests, you can show the user additional terms/topic
in addition to direct results... or you can just tell
them explicitly that their results set for cats also
includes felines, tabbies, etc.

So here's a related question... does your search
engine handle both synonyms AND preferred terms. 
Often 3rd party solutions don't include both and you
are forced to decide how far to stretch the simple
equivalence (synonym ring) feature they've given you. 
Your answer will depend partly on your content, partly
on your indexing guidelines, and partly on how you've
designed your CV.  For example, if you've got a
collection of carefully edited and authored content in
which term usage is very consistent you might need to
concentrate on the alternate terms that point to your
preferred terms (so users are less likely to get null
results).  On the other hand if you have a more
diverse set of content and users that are concerned
with high recall, you will likely spend more effort on
synonyms.  These issues may also impact how you answer
the highlighting question.

Regards,
Chris


=====
______________________________________________
Chris Farnum, Information Architect
E-mail:  crfarnum at yahoo.com
    or   chris at boxesandarrows.com
 Phone:  734-944-8252
   URL:  http://home.earthlink.net/~crfarnum/

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