[Koha-devel] Improving Koha's OPAC Search

[Chad G. Hansen]

No, there is no problem with Koha's tagging function. This system is meant
to use those tags as an aid in finding more relevant results. Our system
uses tags (either from Koha or a third party system) to find more relevant
results to return to the user, not just using stuff stored in a MARC record,
but tags that ordinary people have used to describe the content of books as
well.

Here is what we are looking for.

My group is submitting a proposal for a grant that will hopefully allow us
to implement our new search technology with one of the existing open source
ILS that are being used around the world. We would like to work with Koha
(and maybe it would be more appropriate to talk to the Zebra developers
about this. What do you think?) to see if we can improve its OPAC search
with ideas or features from our own system. We are just in the proposal
phase right now. Attached is a portion of a previously rejected proposal.
The section attached is our previous design/plan section for what we would
like to accomplish.

What we are looking for is an endorement by the Koha (or Zebra) development
community of the idea. A willingness for someone in the development
community to possibly work with us in our attempt to potentially improve
Koha's search.
Our goal is to work with the development community to implement any
improvements we can and then give what we have done to the community (we
have no desire to maintain after the 3 year grant project is up).

Is this the right venue for this request?
What is the concensus from this group?
Do you need more information before commiting to endoring the idea to
possibly work with us in the future (assuming our grant is granted)?

Thanks,
Chad Hansen

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Owen Leonard <oleonard at myacpl.org> wrote:

> > 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
>
> "In solving this problem, we propose an enhanced library system, which
> allows  partial,
> similarity matching of (i) tags defined by ordinary users at a
> folksonomy site that describe
> the content of books and (ii) unrestricted keywords specified by an
> ordinary library patron in a
> query to search for relevant library catalog records. The proposed
> library system allows
> patrons posting a query  Q  using commonly-used  words and ranks the
> retrieved results
> according to their degrees of resemblance with Q while maintaining the
> query processing
> time comparable with the one achieved by current library search engines."
>
> I haven't read the whole thing, but I'm confused by this. Is there
> some aspect of Koha's tagging function which does not fulfill "( i )"
> above?
>
> Is a full-text search of MARC records (including subject headings,
> notes, descriptions, etc) not the same as a search of "unrestricted"
> keywords? This proposal seems to imply a conception of Koha's search
> function as being limited to subject headings.
>
>  -- Owen
>
> --
> Web Developer
> Athens County Public Libraries
> http://www.myacpl.org
>



-- 
Thank you,
Chad

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