[pcplantdb] [permaculture] Groundnut, apios americana and PIW status

Bear Kaufmann bear at ursine-design.com
Mon Feb 13 15:21:48 EST 2006


Hi all,

Those are some major issues.

Is this an artifact of the substring searching algorithm?
Can a better scoring method be implemented?
Latin name match: high
Common name: high
Attributes: mid
String search: lower

We might also want to consider a word index table. Split all the text 
into words (on space, period, hyphen, etc), insert into the table, and 
increment a word count field each time (counts could be useful). That 
table might also be useful in fine tuning search results. We could store 
search terms, find what's not matching etc.
I know PHP offers a method to test the similarity of 2 strings, and also 
convert a string to a simplified phonetic representation. The phonetic 
could help find misspelled words, I'm also wondering if MySQL offers a 
similarity search to use in 'similar word' suggestions.

Regarding the page appearance, I really haven't looked at dev a whole 
lot in terms of design.
If I could get a templating language to work in that'd be nice. Either 
some PHP/Python crossover, a TAL templating system (native Python), or 
maybe Django. A little more Model/View/Controller like (Code <---> Content).
If Chad can process the variables for me, and pass them to the template, 
I can handle layout/HTML, and it's a lot nicer then writing HTML inside 
of Python.

First impressions are important. So maybe we should wait to wrap those 
issues up.

Cheers,
Bear



More information about the pcplantdb mailing list