[Web4lib] Multi-lingual search in BASE Lab

[Dirk Pieper]

** sorry for cross-posting **

Dear all,

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a multi-disciplinary search 
engine which was created and developed by Bielefeld University Library. It 
contains mostly scientific OAI-resources and is based on search technology 
provided by the Norwegian company FAST Search & Transfer 
(www.fastsearch.com). BASE currently comprises of some 7 million documents 
deriving from 452 sources. 

The BASE website has been expanded by a new public test area: the BASE Lab 

http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/lab/index_english.html

On the BASE Lab pages we will introduce new potential features. You are 
invited to test and give feedback, so that we can improve the features 
before they are finally implemented in the live version of BASE.

At present, the BASE Lab features our proposition for a multi-lingual 
search based on the Eurovoc thesaurus. For example, if you switch on this 
option in the BASE Lab search mask and enter "market acces", the result 
list will bring up documents in German, Finnish, French and Spanish a.o. 
which include this word in the respective language. 

In addition, you may choose an option which retrieves even synonyms, if 
these are provided in the thesaurus. The thesaurus comprises 21 languages 
and is administered by the Office for Official Publications of the 
European Communities, for further information please visit the english 
version of:

http://europa.eu/eurovoc/

Another feature offered for testing is a browsing option across three 
hierarchy levels of the  Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). However, 
browsing is only possible for documents, whose OAI metadata include 
classification information according to DDC. This condition is met for 
example by all German OPUS installations and repositories which are 
certified by DINI. However, the depth of indexing could be better as some 
of the classes are not in use. After all, at present some 54,000 documents 
can be browsed. 

We are truly looking forward to constructive criticism in order to optimize 
these new features.

For further information please visit: http://www.base-search.net

Regards

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Dirk Pieper
BASE
Bielefeld UL
Universitaetsstrasse 25, D-33615 Bielefeld
fon: +49 (0)521/ 106-4010  fax: -6452
www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de
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