[OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** a question/comment about relevance ranking

[Melissa Belvadi]

We are now on 1.6. I still don't understand the relevance ranking
system, or perhaps disagree with it, or maybe we can tweak it locally? 

Here's a search I just did:  keyword: food society 

The very first hit, sorted by "relevance" was:  
Free radicals and oxidative stress : environment, drugs and food
additives / organized and edited by C. Rice-Evans, B. Halliwell and G.G.
Lunt. 
Somewhere in the "local notes" was a mention of the publication being
affiliated with a professional society. The word society appears in the
author and that note, but not in title or subject headings. 

The next several were more or less the same kind as the first. 

Way down at position 9 was this gem, which is exactly the kind of book 
I had in mind: 
The Cultural feast : an introduction to food and society / Carol A.
Bryant ... [et al.]. 

As a librarian, I would expect that matches to my keywords appearing in
the title to have the very highest weight, then (or possibly co-equal)
subject headings, and much lower down in the formula would be 5xx fields
and author fields. 

Is this a philosophical problem or a technical one? Can we modify the
ranking algorithm locally at the level of individual MARC tags or even
index groupings (eg things in the title index, subject index, etc.)? 

Thanks! 

Melissa 

---
Melissa Belvadi
Emerging Technologies & Metadata Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca
902-566-0581 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/attachments/20100113/45b4da9c/attachment.htm