NAME

ROADS::Expand - A class to perform simple query expansions

SYNOPSIS

  use ROADS::Expand;
  $expanded_query = expand("color");

DESCRIPTION

This class defines a simple method to perform limited query expansion. It is intended to cater for the small number of very common word substitutions which typically cause problems with Internet searching, e.g. the use of "colour" versus "color".

METHODS

expand( original_query_string );

This method takes the original_query_string variable and performs query expansion on it, returning the result as a string ready for variable assignment.

FILES

config/expansions - list of search terms and expansions, found using the globally scoped variable expansionfile or pre-initialized into the hash array EXPAND.

FILE FORMAT

Each line of the file consists of a term, e.g. "colour", and its expansions, separated by whitespace, e.g.

  colour color

BUGS

Now that we have WGI based thesaurus lookup, this seems anachronistic. Should we make it capable of using a DB(M) lookup, or perhaps junk it?

SEE ALSO

"wppd.pl" in bin, ROADS::Index

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1988, Martin Hamilton <martinh@gnu.org> and Jon Knight <jon@net.lut.ac.uk>. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

It was developed by the Department of Computer Studies at Loughborough University of Technology, as part of the ROADS project. ROADS is funded under the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), the European Commission Telematics for Research Programme, and the TERENA development programme.

AUTHOR

Jon Knight <jon@net.lut.ac.uk>, Martin Hamilton <martinh@gnu.org>