December 2009 --Access Innovations, Inc. announces additional search enhancing options to its Data Harmony taxonomy software offerings. These options add more ways to search thereby improving the findability of information on Internet and intranet sites. Visitors to www.mediasleuth.com (MediaSleuth) can try out these features. This site of non-print educational resources hosts a database of 60,000 titles, indexed with subject terms from the NICEM (National Center for Educational Media) thesaurus.
•Autocompletion of the search string: This feature 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, if you type “psy” in the text box at the MediaSleuth site, a list of about 12 NICEM thesaurus terms and three synonyms of NICEM thesaurus terms displays. If you click on the synonym “Psychic phenomena”, the search function will return “Parapsychology”, the preferred term in the NICEM thesaurus. Then it will show the records that have been indexed with that term.
•Display of narrower terms: This feature alerts the searcher to more precise terms. In the MediaSleuth search function, once a searcher has selected a term, additional terms may display. If the thesaurus term has narrower (more specific) terms associated with it in the same thesaurus, those terms will display; the searcher can choose to see the records indexed with a selected narrower term.
•Display of related terms: This is similar to the narrower terms display feature, but with aim on the global effect. Whereas the inclusion of narrower terms can make the search more precise, the linking to related terms expands 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.
•Structured browsing: This set of features provides a convenient pathway from search to item. Visitors to www.mediasleuth.com can see the expandable/collapsible navigation tree for taxonomy browsing on the left. By entering a search word or expression in the Search and Thesaurus Discovery text box on the right, the user can view the rule from the M.A.I. rulebase that includes the word, the preferred term(s) associated with the word(s), and titles that include the preferred term as an indexing term. After using either the navigation tree or the rulebase-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.
•Web services for back tagging and inline keyword metatagging: This capability enables the searcher to go directly to the part of a document that is discovered by the search query. The demo, using taxonomy enrichment, is at http://www.nicem.com:8081/MAIStroWSJSPClient/
•Faceted Search: Advanced search using the XML elements in your data, or the metadata fields in your database paired with the taxonomy allows high recall, excellent precision, and truly targeted search.
For more information about Access Innovations, Data Harmony applications, or the search enhancements, call (800) 926-8328, e-mail mhlava@accessinn.com, or visit: www.accessinn.com or www.dataharmony.com