graphbib (2007.07)

Over 22,500 article references in the fields of computer graphics,
computer animation, geometric modeling and computer vision.

In this release of the "graphbib" search engine, both natural language and Boolean full-text searching are supported.

Results can be sorted by year of publication (in ascending or descending order), or by relevance (in ascending or descending order). Relevance sorting is not available in Boolean full-text search mode.

The default search mode is natural language full-text searching. One or more search terms are entered, and they are compared against the database. Any record which contains any of the search words is returned to the user. The relevance of a particular returned record is an indicator of how many of the search terms are represented in the record, and in what position.

Advanced searching may be accomplished by selecting the "Boolean" checkbox, which enables Boolean full-text searching. In this mode, the following operators can be employed in order to fine-tune the search process:

• (no operator) : By default (when neither + nor - are specified), the word is optional, but the rows that contain it are rated higher.
• + : A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.
• - : A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any rows that are returned.
• > and < : These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance score assigned to a returned result. The > operator increases the contribution, and the < operator decreases the contribution. (Please see the examples section below.)
• ( and > : Parentheses group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
• ˜ : A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the row's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking "noise" words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but not excluded altogether, as with the - operator.
• * : The asterisk services as the truncation or wildcard operator. It should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.
• " : A phrase that is enclosed with double quote characters matches only rows that contain that phrase literally, as it was typed.

The following examples demonstrate the use of these operators.

'apple banana'

Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.

'+apple +juice'

Find rows that contain both words.

'+apple macintosh'

Find that contain the word 'apple,' but rank rows higher if they also contain the word 'macintosh.'

'+apple -macintosh'

Find rows that contain 'apple' but not 'macintosh.'

Note: the minimum word length for searching is currently four characters. Lowering this to three characters is under discussion. We do apologize for this small inconvenience.

For more information on full-text searching, please consult the MySQL documentation.