Can anyone confirm my understanding of how DSpace performs keyword indexing/searching? I suspect that it is doing automatic mapping of singular and plural forms of words.
How I came to this understanding was as follows. I was searching for an item authored by Alys (alternate spelling of Alice) Clark. I retrieved three items none of which had the word alys in the metadata or bitstream. If I searched for alys on its own I got 168 hits and a cursory glance at the results list showed that they all had an author with some part of their name being ali. I then tried searching for each of the following forms aly, ali, alis, alys alies All of these as single search terms retrieved exactly the same number of records - 168. Results included items with the following strings in Abstract - ALIS (Advanced Landmine Imaging System), which is a novel landmine detection sensor system - Current ventilatory practices for the management of ALI favor low tidal volumes - Current Trends in Periodontal Diagnosis & Disease Recognition in Malaysia / T.B. Taiyeb Ali - Radiology in the acute abdomen / P.G. Devitt, A. Aly, M. Thomas My conclusion is that DSpace is doing some process of mapping plural to singular forms of words including allowing for alternate endings. If it is doing this it is very clever but just a little annoying as Alys is not the plural of Ali. Also if clever enough to do this why can't it map fiber to fibre and color to colour which would have much greater benefits in searching a database that includes North American and European data. Cheers, Vanessa Barrett Digital Services Librarian The University of Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 5005 Ph : +61 8 8303 4625 e-mail: [email protected] CRICOS Provider Number 00123M ----------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT: This message may contain confidential or legally privileged information. If you think it was sent to you by mistake, please delete all copies and advise the sender. For the purposes of the SPAM Act 2003, this email is authorised by The University of Adelaide. Think green: read on the screen.
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