[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Improving Evergreen's OPAC Search

[Chad G. Hansen]

Thanks for your response, Mike.

The design of the enhanced library search engine we would like to integrate
with Evergreen 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) Volume 60, Issue 7, pp. 1392-1406, July 2009.

You can download the paper from the link and view it if you would like.
Essentially the system uses folksonomies (tagging) to provide more relevant
search results to the user.

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

Once again is this something that the community would be interested in
healing us do?
Does anyone see any potential problems or issues with trying to do this with
Evergreen?

Thanks,
Chad

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Chad G. Hansen <cgh at byu.edu> 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
> > Evergreen's OPAC interface.
> > Others on the team have come up with a fast and effective way to do
> > searching using folksonomies which greatly increases relevance of results
> > 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 Open-ILS community's involvement as much as
> > possible.
> >
> > We would like to either enhance the existing search algorithm of
> Evergreen
> > 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).
> >
>
> We would be interested in hearing your ideas, certainly.  If you'd
> like to share some details of your proposed algorithm, and perhaps
> research output if your team has written any papers, that would be a
> great first step.
>
> Search is a complicated beast, as is Evergreen in general, so we can't
> really talk about replacing or integrating anything without
> understanding what this new piece is so that we can help you consider
> the consequences (positive or negative) that any new code may have on
> other areas of the system.
>
> --
> Mike Rylander
>  | VP, Research and Design
>  | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
>  | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
>  | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
>  | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com
>



-- 
Thank you,
Chad

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