Using a thesaurus to expand search terms

You can broaden a query by searching not only for a specific search term, but also for terms that are related to it. You can automate this process by using Net Search Extender's functions for looking up and extracting the related search terms from a thesaurus. A thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary of semantically related terms that usually covers a specific subject area.

DB2 Net Search Extender lets you expand a search term by adding additional terms from a thesaurus that you have previously created. Refer to Syntax of search arguments to find out how to use thesaurus expansion in a query.

To create a thesaurus for using it in a search application requires a thesaurus definition file that has to be compiled into an internal format, the thesaurus dictionary.

This chapter describes: