Access Innovations Offers Search Enhancement
ALBUQUERQUE, NM, December 30, 2008 — Access Innovations, Inc. announces new search enhancing options to its Data Harmony taxonomy software offerings. These options improve the findability of information on Internet and intranet sites. Visitors to www.nicem.com/search.php (the site of the National Information Center for Educational Media) and www.mediasleuth.com (MediaSleuth) can try out these features. Enhancements integrate with a controlled vocabulary.
Autosuggestion simplifies search string entry and presents additional search possibilities. Typing in the beginning characters of a search string prompts a list of selectable thesaurus terms and synonyms that begin with that string. For example, typing "psy" in the search text box at the NICEM site, a list of about 12 NICEM thesaurus terms and three synonyms of NICEM thesaurus terms displays. Clicking on the synonym "Psychic phenomena," displays "Parapsychology," the preferred term in the NICEM thesaurus, and returns the records that have been indexed with that term. Displayed excerpts from the records include highlighting of the search string.
The narrower term display feature alerts the searcher to more precise terms. If the thesaurus term selected has narrower (more specific) terms associated with it, those terms will display in a separate list as hyperlinks to allow the searcher to narrow or more specifically target their search.
The related term display is similar to the narrower terms display feature, but with a somewhat opposite effect. Whereas the inclusion of narrower terms can make the search more precise, the inclusion of related terms can expand the search. Related terms are those thesaurus terms that have a conceptual connection to each other but that are not associated hierarchically as broader or narrower terms.
The structured browsing set of features provides a convenient pathway from search to purchase. Visitors to www.mediasleuth.com can see the expandable/collapsible navigation tree for taxonomy browsing in a left navigation pane. Users can graphically follow a branch to the most specific term required to launch a search of the records and return those that include that term as an indexing term.
The search and discovery feature employs the indexing rule base to match entered search strings with Preferred terms from the thesaurus and return records indexed with them. As an example, the entry of "germ" returns records indexed with thesaurus terms "microorganism" and "personal hygiene." It is also possible to display additional information recorded in the thesaurus or indexing rule base. The full term record can be displayed to reflect synonyms (equivalent terms) and related terms, with each entry a hyperlink. Displaying the full rule from the M.A.I. rule base illustrates how the indexing engine identifies the meaning of the term in context (e.g. "germ warfare").
After using either the navigation tree or the rule base-associated options to discover appropriate database records, the user can simply click on a product name and then click again to add the product to an e-commerce shopping cart.
A web service for back tagging and inline keyword meta tagging enables the searcher to go directly to the part of a document that is discovered by the search query. A demonstration, using taxonomy enrichment, is available at http://www.nicem.com:8081/MAIStroWSJSPClient/
