[sword-devel] search idea

[Jerry Hastings]

At 12:11 PM 12/30/1999 +0000, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
>Yes, it does. The construction of a thesaurus is not easy. All I said was
>that the (search) feature ought to be there and I knew how to program it.
>:-)

I understood that. I agree that support for it is a first step.

>> ... Rogets early editions are now PD and may provide a place to start.
>
>I wasn't aware that they were PD. However, care is needed using the word
>thesaurus in Information Retrieval sense and in the Roget sense. Whilst
>Roget's is a list of synonyms the IR model is much more general and
>flexible.

Yes. I just suggest it as a source that can be processed for some data. It
will be missing a lot of biblical terms. And will have many unneeded terms
also.

>>>An automated solution might be possible if every Bible text was marked up
>>>with Strong's numbers.
>>
>> With indexes of the Greek and Hebrew texts, one could do a combined Greek,
>> Hebrew and English (or whatever) thesaurus. As long as you can search more
>> than one index at a time this should work without having to have Strongs
>> numbers in the text.
>
>I'm having difficulty understanding how this would work.

Take a Greek text and index it. Take a Hebrew text and index it. You now
have two indexes. If you then have a thesaurus that at some level links cow
with the Hebrew parah, and you do a search for "cow" and search the Hebrew
index, you get hits on the verses where the KJV has "kine" because there
will be a hit on those verses in the Hebrew index. If one did such a search
for cattle and the thesaurus link to such words as parah and the Greek
tauros, and you searched the Greek and Hebrew indexes, you can get hits in
the Greek and Hebrew and then use those hits to display verses in the
currant module, say KJV. These searches would be easier to do with embedded
Strong's numbers. But you see how searching multiple indexes in parallel
can be useful. One would not have to know any Greek or Hebrew to get some
benefit from those indexes. And you can use texts that do not have the
embedded Strong's numbers. Instead of using the KJV one could be using BBE
which has no Strong's numbers and it would still work. 

Jerry