[Sigia-l] search results and thesauri

[Chris Farnum]

Donna and listers-

Sorry for the late reply.  Just got done with a
blissfully computer-free holiday weekend.

The "explode" feature has been around a long time -
for example the command line Dialogue interface.  You
tend to find it in mature/proprietary/for-fee
interfaces with large thesauri and/or subject
headings.  One public example is the interface for
browing the National Library of Medicine's Medical
Subject Headings (MeSH).

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/2002/MBrowser.html

This offers you a couple different ways to "explode." 
It's also not a very friendly interface for novice
users- much more geared toward experts (though I'm not
sure that many "experts" would have an easy time using
it.)

I'll let you know if I can think of any other public
examples.  Anyone else have one?

By the way- Bitpipe (http://www.bitpipe.com) is one of
my favorite thesaurus-friendly example sites.  Someone
mentioned boolean query building interfaces a few days
ago.  I agree that it's hard to get these right and
that they are not necessarily for beginners to use... 
that said, Bitpipe's advanced search query builder is
not a bad example. 
(http://www.bitpipe.com/data/advsearch)  I included
something like this in a design for a
science/engineering citation index database a few
years back (Proquest INSPEC).

-Chris


--- Donna Marie Fritzsche <donnamarie at oneimage.com>
wrote:
> At 12:03 PM -0700 5/22/02, Chris Farnum wrote:
> >   Some thesaurus-friendly search
> >interfaces have an "explode" feature for broadening
> a
> >search out to the synonyms and related terms.
> 
> Chris,
> Im jumping into this kind of late.
> Can you point me to an example of the explode
> function?
> Thanks,
> Donna Fritzsche,
> Consulting IA, etc
> 
> 
> -- 


=====
______________________________________________
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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