[Metadatalibrarians] Seeking advice: Retrieval of NTs within a digital library application

[Caitlin O'Connor]

All,

I developed a business thesaurus which contains over 600 terms 4 levels deep
for a digital library project.  I am currently working with a team of
programmers to develop the search application and need some advice from some
fellow metadata librarians.

Currently our search algorithm is written so that if a user performs a
general keyword search and the term searched matches a term in the
thesaurus, items tagged with this term are retrieved and ranked first
followed by items which contain the search term in the item title or
description.  When a user performs a general keyword search for a term which
happens to be in the thesaurus, we also return items tagged with its
narrower thesaurus terms .

For example if someone does a search for the term “entrepreneurial finance,”
we first return all items tagged with this term.  We also return those items
tagged with “venture capital” which is a narrower thesaurus term of
entrepreneurial finance but rank these lower.   (We also provide a visual
thesaurus term tree to the left of the result set so that the user can
clearly see that 4 of his or her results are tagged with entrepreneurial
finance and 2 are tagged with the NT venture capital.)

That said, we also return partial thesaurus term matches for general keyword
searches.  For example, if a user searches the term “entrepreneurial,” we
will return items tagged with the thesaurus term “entrepreneurial finance.”
In this case, do you think we should also return the NTs (narrower terms) of
“entrepreneurial finance”?  My initial inclination is no because the partial
search term is too far removed from the NT.  In addition to potential
relevancy problems, this may not be a sustainable practice as our collection
grows.  That said some of my colleagues would prefer to return the NTs for
partial BT matches.  I would like to get the opinion of other metadata
librarians out there before I make a final recommendation.  Any thoughts
would be appreciated.



Thanks,

Caitlin





Caitlin O’Connor

Interactive Information Manager, Kelley Direct
Indiana University  Kelley School of Business
812.856.4847

croconno at indiana.edu