I also try to define the problem. In the library world there are some general and special thesaurus, which reveal the relations between concepts. The relations have types as Lee described: Prefered Term (PT), Broader Terms (BT), Narrower Terms (NT) Related Terms (RT) and others. Some of these thesaurus covers lots of concepts, e.g. the Hungarian Common Thesaurus has more than 60 000 concepts.
For searching perspective it would be fine if you can use this knowledge in search. My imaginative use case: - the user enters a term and maybe he turns on a flag to get not just the term, but all terms, which related somehow with this (usually the synonyms and narrower terms). - Solr first find the queried term(s) in the thesaurus, then finds the related terms, modifies and issues the query e.g. query is fruits, and it becames (fruit OR apple OR banana OR ...) This use case is different from the synonym handler, which - as far as I know - modifies the index, and injects synonyms at the position of the original word. My use case suppose, that we maintain thesaurus as a different "database" (maybe another Solr index). My Solr knowledge is not deep enough to decide, that this use case could be achive with combination of existing patches or contributed modules. If someone would start such a project, I would happily contribute. Péter http://eXtensibleCatalog.org 2010/12/10 Chris Hostetter <hossman_luc...@fucit.org>: > > > : a term can have a Prefered Term (PT), many Broader Terms (BT), Many Narrower > : Terms (NT) Related Terms (RT) etc > ... > : User supplied Term is say : Ski > : > : Prefered term: Skiing > : Broader terms could be : Ski and Snow Boarding, Mountain Sports, Sports > : Narrower terms: down hill skiing, telemark, cross country > : Related terms: boarding, snow boarding, winter holidays > > I'm still lost. > > You've described a black box with some sample input ("Ski") and some > corrisponding sample output (PT=..., BT=..., NT=..., RT=....) -- but you > haven't explained what you want to do with tht black box. Assuming such a > black box existed in solr what are you expecting/hoping to do with it? > how would such a black box modify solr's user experience? what is your > goal? > > Smells like an XY Problem... > http://people.apache.org/~hossman/#xyproblem > > Your question appears to be an "XY Problem" ... that is: you are dealing > with "X", you are assuming "Y" will help you, and you are asking about "Y" > without giving more details about the "X" so that we can understand the > full issue. Perhaps the best solution doesn't involve "Y" at all? > See Also: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=542341 > > > -Hoss >
