ILIAS open source Forums

Why not a search dialogue (for the missed simple things) like the actual dialogue – with some constraints:

- to make the user noticed that there has to be a minimum of one marked object type, just mark the field group with a coloured asterisk and set the initial marking to learning module - may be a drop-down list with multiple markings enabled is an opinion, too

- in my opinion the yet marked standard metadata is ok, but it needs a hint to average users, what the meaning of metadata is

- tell the user in the result where(!) the term has been found (and may be what part of the term)

The reason for the last pointed aspect:
In a specific part of my not yet finished usability evaluation it was easy to extract, that new users won't be able to retrace the reason why search results include some objects, if the specific result doesn't define(!) why it's been issued. The conclusion is to show where (and maybe what parts of) the term has been found in the listed objects.

In the specific part of the study I was forced to use the search for users (the search for learning objects was in the bobo at that time). But it was a nice comparable example anyway, the summary is something like:
With a portion of luck an IT pro tells you shrugging: "Well, there must be another field in the db which was included in the search." (regardless if it was intended at all by the user to search in not known and shown attributes…)
And the average user (lecturers, students, …) will say: "Where does it come from? The search seems to be broken."
The first is one extreme which was noticed in the evaluation, the latter is what I've heard at the HSU.

regards
Olaf Scholl

I would like to introduce the idea of making the search function also avialable through a SOAP interface. This way you could easily integrate the ILIAS Search Engine into other web portals or applications. What do you think?

Florian

Hello.
It isn't at all clear whether the search respects the case (upper/lower or not). Could we plan to have a switch for that for the advanced search (respec tcase/ignore case) ?

Another suggestion: the search engine could easily process HTML (imported) learning modules; that could be valuable.

Most users do not expect search to be case-sensitive. I would suggest that it be made case-insensitive, and that no switch for this is needed.

The search is ALREADY case-insensitive, but that sould be pointed somehow.
Additionnaly, the search only searches words, so misses subwords.
Another possible switch.

Actually, ILIAS can do this. Simply enter SQL wildcards in the search field.

_ (Underline) matches any sequence of multiple characters
% (Percent) matches a single character

_ick_ searches for all words that contain 'ick', ex. Chicken, Pick, ...


Maybe this should be documented somehow. Or the wildcards should be changed, so that more common ones are used.

That would be good information to display on the "Advanced Search" page.

No. I doesn't work here (ILIAS 3.3.2).
Did you verify ?

Yes, but I am running 3.2.4.
(I have no 3.3.x installation.)

I'll retry with 3.4.x tomorrow. Maybe the feature has been removed?

I made the following request concerning the search engine in the ILIAS-Devel List but i'm moving it to the forum for further discussion:
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i'm facing the following problem at the moment:
All of our learning modules is placed within courses. To make the content also available
as a kind of reference guide, i would like to allow the users to search the content with
the search function. The Problem is now, that users are only allowed to
search content of courses in which they are registered. (Which basically makes
sense) To allow them to search the full content, i linked all modules into a separate
category. Now the users can search the full content but for every course they are
registered in they a get duplicated results, one from the course and one from my
search category.

As workaround i modified the ContentObject class, so that it does not search in
courses at all. Of course this is a bad hack, so i'm thinking about a more general
approach to solve such a problem. Maybe it would make sense to implement an option
for a course which lets the users access its content through the search engine even
when they are not subscribed to it. Does anyone have similar problems. Any other
ideas to solve them?

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Werner Randelshofer made the following suggestion:
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Maybe it would be sufficient, to change the way, search results are
presented. Instead of listing each reference from the RBAC tree to the
object as if it were an individual search result, one should group
together all references that point to the same object.

e.g. if the user searches for object A, which has two references, it is
currently listed like this:

Title of object A Path to reference one
Title of object A Path to reference two

This could be changed, to look like this instead:

Object A
Path to reference one
Path to reference two


Florian

Seems to work with users but not with LM (3.4.0 Beta 2). And the online documentation is a must have - the average lecturer or student doesn't know something about sql-syntax... he's trying the things from well known search engines.

regards
Olaf Scholl

Right, I tested this with users on an empty installation. I assumed that searching for learning modules would work in the same way.

We have no average users on our institution. The age and the technological experience varies a great deal. Therefore it is essential, that - whatever search syntax is used - it has to be explained on the advanced search panel.

Yes, that's definitely how it should be placed at the user's disposal.

For version 3.5.0 the internal search engine has been improved and the meta data handling in the data base has been redesigned.

Funding: Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg / ILIAS OS
Use Cases: available
Implementation: Databay AG / ILIAS OS
Documentation: not yet available