[Koha-devel] Improving Koha's OPAC Search

[Chad G. Hansen]

Thank you for your responses.

The design of the enhanced library search engine we would like to integrate
with Koha can be found in the 2009 JASIST paper which was co-authored by
several members of our team now. Here is the reference for that paper:

Maria Soledad Pera, William Lund, and Yiu-Kai Ng, A Sophisticated Library
Search Strategy Using Kolksonomies and Similarity Matches <
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~dennis/papers/EnLibS-Rev.pdf<http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/%7Edennis/papers/EnLibS-Rev.pdf>>.
Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology
(JASIST) Volumne 60, Issue 7, pp. 1392-1406, July 2009.

You can download the paper from the link and view it if you would like.
Essentialy the sustem uses folksonomies (tagging) to provide more relevent
search results to the user. The tags they used to do similarity matching
were actually from LibraryThing.

I would suggest reading at least the abstract of this document if you want
to know more of what thy did.

I will look into Zebra a little more to see if our answer is with them.

Thanks,
Chad


On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Joe Atzberger <ohiocore at gmail.com> wrote:

> NoZebra mode is at a severe disadvantage in terms of featureset,
> performance, scalability, extensibility and basically everything (except
> ease of installation).  I would not recommend that anyone who wants their
> feature to be used by even modestly sized libraries should develop it for
> NoZebra mode.  The only widely useful development would be with zebra.
>
> To clarify: what they call folksonomy, most people nowadays just call
> tagging.  Koha has tagging already, and just needs to work it into the zebra
> indexes better.  Another valid expansion of this feature would be to
> integrate with LibraryThing's shared tags metadata.  That takes the tags
> outside the ILS instance and into a separate repository.
>
> --joe
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Michael Hafen <mdhafen at tech.washk12.org>wrote:
>
>> Koha uses two methods of searching in the OPAC, and in general.  The
>> first is through third party open source package from IndexData called
>> Zebra.  The second is NoZebra mode.  My opinion is that applying your
>> algorithm to the NoZebra mode would be the easiest option here.  Unless
>> you want to also work with IndexData to add to that package.
>>
>> I'm not totally familiar with how NoZebra searches work currently, but
>> my understanding is that there is a database table of search terms and
>> the record id's associated with those terms.  Others from the list may
>> have a better understanding, or be able to provide more details.  Point
>> is that there may need to be some changes to the database as part of
>> implementing your algorithm.  This isn't a big deal though, Koha has an
>> upgrade mechanism to handle this.
>>
>> The big catch is that library formats (MARC) will play a big role in
>> what is index for searching.  Some limited knowledge will be necessary.
>> This may be provided by members of the Koha developer community though.
>> Just be warned that the various MARC formats are complex.
>>
>> To summarize: adding your algorithm to Koha is possible, and will be
>> easy with help from the developers community.
>>
>> Good luck with your project.
>>
>> On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 10:17 -0700, Chad G. Hansen wrote:
>> > I am part of a team of researchers in the Brigham Young University
>> > Computer Science department who are interested in improving the
>> > searching used by Koha's OPAC interface.
>> > Others on the team have come up with a fast and effective way to do
>> > searching using folksonomies and we are interested in adding that
>> > system to one of the open-source library systems out there. We are
>> > considering both Koha and Evergreen for this.
>> > We would like to have the Koha communities involvement as much as
>> > possible.
>> >
>> > We would like to either enhance the existing search algorithm of Koha
>> > or replace it with our own search.
>> >
>> > We would like to know if anyone is interested in being involved with
>> > this?
>> > We would also like to get any pointers on how possible and how
>> > difficult this might be for our team to do this, keeping in mind that
>> > we are newish to the library specific protocols and formats (MARC,
>> > Z39.50, etc).
>> >
>> > Thanks for your consideration.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Thank you,
>> > Chad Hansen
>> >
>> > e. cgh at byu.edu
>> > p. 801-477-0295
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Koha-devel mailing list
>> > Koha-devel at lists.koha.org
>> > http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
>>
>>
>> --
>> Michael Hafen
>> Systems Analyst and Programmer
>> Washington County School District
>> Utah, USA
>>
>> for Koha checkout
>> http://development.washk12.org/gitweb/
>> or
>> git://development.washk12.org/koha
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Koha-devel mailing list
>> Koha-devel at lists.koha.org
>> http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
>>
>
>


-- 
Thank you,
Chad

e. chansen4 at gmail.com
e. cgh at byu.edu
p. 801-477-0295
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