Finding a topic

Revision as of 15:07, 17 February 2015

Finder is used to locate and open topics. Finder locates beside the Topics tab as shown above.

Finder is a simple free text search. Finder tries to locate given search word in topics. You can search with any topic element or element combination. Search result appears below the search field. Double clicking a topic in the search result opens the topic into the topic panel. Right clicking a topic opens context menu with a large number of topic tools.

Search words used in Finder can contain Java specific regular expression characters such as dot. Finder doesn't restrict search word lenght. As an extreme example you could start search with a single dot and the search would result every topic in Wandora. Viewing very large result sets is time consuming and may cause OutOfMemoryExceptions in Wandora. This is especially true when you are accessing database topic maps.

Find

Addition to Finder tab, topics can be searched by selecting Edit > Search... or by pressing CTRL-F. Both actions open Search and query dialog window:

To make a search, write your query to the text field and press Search button. Search query is interpreted as a regular expression allowing rather complicated searches. Search results are viewed below the search field like this

To open any topic in the search table, double mouse click topic name or right mouse click the topic name and select menu option Open topic. Addition to regular expression searches Wandora features also string similarity search.

String similarity

Similar tab is used for searching similar topics. Wandora user can search topics that only resemble matched string. In other words, it is sufficient that search query matches topic name only partly. Wandora uses Sam Chapman's SimMetrics open source library to calculate string similarities. Below is a screen capture of Wandora's Similarity tab.

Available similarity types are

• Levenshtein distance
• Needleman-Wunch distance
• Smith-Waterman distance
• Block distance
• Monge Elkan distance
• Jaro distance
• Jaro Winkler
• SoundEx distance

Addition to similarity type Wandora user can set the threshold for required similarity. Similarity threshold is a value between 0 and 100. If similarity threshold is close to 100, compared strings must be very similar and only minimal differences are allowed. If similarity threshold is close to 0, compared strings can be very different and they are still considered as similar.

Some similarity measures use Gap cost and Tokenizer settings. First specifies a penalty caused by a gap in word (usually a space character). Latter is used to split words out of text.

Difference instead similarity option changes the similarity measure to a difference measure. If selected, Wandora searches for strings that are maximally different compared to given string.

Wandora views similarity search results below the search settings. To open any topic in the result table, double click a topic name.

Query scripts

Query tab is used to write and run queries. A query is a little script written in Javascript and using query directives from Java package org.wandora.query2. Directives can be chained to sequential and parallel pipelines. When a query is executed, it takes topics and associations as input and generates a result containing topics and literals. Results are viewed below the Run query button. Read the query language documentation for more information about the possibilities of Wandora's query language.

TMQL

Wandora support Topic Map Query Language (TMQL). Wandora uses TMQL4J engine for the TMQL support. TMQL scripts can be written and executed in Search and query dialog by selecting TMQL tab.