[Dspace-general] Fuzzy search in DSpace

[Vlastimil Krejcir]

   Hi all,

maybe I've just discovered something that is well known in the whole 
DSpace community. I'm not sure if everybody knows that Lucene (and so the 
DSpace) has fuzzy search. In my opinion this feature is not promoted 
enough (or not promoted at all). You can use the fuzzy search by adding 
"~" to query.

For example we have an item about the movie Spiderman. So the query 
"spiterman" doesn't give us any results whereas "spiterman~" give us the 
right item about the movie (and maybe more items depends on the fuzzy 
search setting).

This can be use also for the thing I personally call "cutted of diacritics 
search". Because it also works for words with diacritics (so "krejcir~" 
gives all items where I'm the author even if there is only my surname with 
diacritics ("Krejčíř") stored. It's not exact because this gives also 
results which have nothing common with me. On the other hand why not to 
use it.

For details you can consult the Lucene documentation.

hope this post might help

Vlastik

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Vlastimil Krejčíř
Library and Information Centre, Institute of Computer Science
Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic
Email: krejcir (at) ics (dot) muni (dot) cz
Phone: +420 549 49 3872
ICQ: 163963217
Jabber: krejvl at jabber.org
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