Dan,
you should not dismiss the vocabulary problem as a trivial thing.
Although fulltext searching has come a long way to provide more
comprehensive and precise results - e.g. through the use of thesauri
-, using the more advanced features requires a good understanding of
the search tools available and the subject domain.
Another interesting question we can ask ourselves, if we have the
vision that virtually all suppliers should be on such a super-catalog,
how do we control 'honest' retrieval of items from the catalog.
Obviously the incentive is large for companies to be listed on top of
the hit-list, simlar to the internet search engines. This may be
either through paying the catalog provider or through amending the
product description to have a large probability of matching a search.
Especially where services are offered, the desire to have a high
search-matching probability could be large. For example an EDI service
provider might want to have a large number of ERP systems, XML,
EDIFACT, internet etc. mentioned in the product/service description.
Still, it could probably be a really useful tool, compared to the less
focused tools we have today.
Erlend.
Dan Kazzaz wrote:
> However, given the full text search capabilities we have today, a catalogue
> with full text descriptions, amenable to text searching is highly desirable
> and useful. This capability is part of the business driver for the Internet
> search engines. For negotiated, governmental pricing environments, this
> could be very useful. The challenge of the vocabulary of the description
> fields is omnipresent, but even this is overcome by minimal effort.
>
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