From: gilbertd@sunflower.bio.indiana.edu (Don Gilbert)
Subject: Booleans, partial words and other WAIS mods in biology data searches
Organization: Biology, Indiana University - Bloomington
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 13:42:32 GMT


I have just about finished adding boolean operators 'and' and 'not', 
partial words, literal phrases, symbol matching and extended results
retrieval to the WAIS release 8b5 source, and the Gopher server here
is sporting these new features.    It will be next week until the source
to these is publicly available, but you can try these out now via
Gopher or WAIS to ftp.bio.indiana.edu.

To answer a general question of using WAIS (& Gopher) for large databank
searching, biology gophers are doing that now with great success.
We have indexed the databank of all known gene sequences, called Genbank,
which is some 300 megabytes in size, and contains over 86000 separate
entries.  The WAIS index of this is around 50 megabytes, but it is that
low due to some modifications I made to the wais source (the default
size when I first tried unmodified wais indexing was around 300 megabytes
of index!).   Gopher/WAIS searching and retrieval from this large
databank is very fast, possibly faster than that provided by some software
specially written for searching this database.

The boolean 'and' and literal phrase modifications I'm using in WAIS were
written by Tim Gauslin for use with USGS earth science databases in
his WAIS service (see below).   His modifications for database search
also include a special keyword field indexing, useful for databases with
fixed fields, which I may also borrow.


This is a summary of new biology data searching and retrieval offerings
at the IUBio Archive (Internet host ftp.bio.indiana.edu).  These
data are now available via a Wide Area Information Server, WAIS, as
well as via Internet Gopher.

Here is the general WAIS source pointer for this archive.  
(:source
   :version  3
   :ip-address "129.79.224.25"
   :ip-name "ftp.bio.indiana.edu"
   :tcp-port 210
   :database-name "INFO"
   :cost 0.00
   :cost-unit :free
   :maintainer "archive@bio.indiana.edu"
   :description "
This WAIS service includes several indexed Biology information sources,
including Genbank nucleic acid gene sequence databank, Drosophila genetics
BioSci/Bionet network news, and others.
")

This WAIS service sports several zippy modifications.  These include
boolean operators 'and' and 'not', partial word matches,
literal phrase matches, and extended number of results.

Boolean searches: The terms 'and' and 'not' are effective 
    in modifying the query.   For example,
    
    Query: red and green not blue
    Result: just those records with both the words 'red' and 'green',
            excluding all records with the word 'blue'.
            
Partial words:  The asterisk (*) applied at the end of
    a partial word will match all documents with words that 
    start with the partial word.  For example,
    
    Query: hum*
    Result: all records with 'hum', 'hummingbird', 'human',
            'humbug', etc.
            
Literal phrases:  If quotes (') or double quotes (\") surrounding
     a phrase, it will match that phrase exactly.  For example,
     
     Query: 'red rooster-39'
     Result:  only those records with the the full string
            'red rooster-39' will be matched.

     There are some practical limits on this.  The first part
     of a literal must be a word that is otherwise indexed.
     Thus your literal cannot start with a symbol or other
     word delimiter.  Within quotes, the boolean operators
     and the partial word key are not active.
     
These features can generally be mixed in a query, for example:
     Query:  'Df(32)-[34]red' and hum* not Brown        


Results limit (Gopher only):  The maximum number of results that
     are returned for a query is by default up to 200 (may change).
     But you may set a higher, or lower, maximum by appending
     the greater than (>) symbol immediately followed by the
     number you wish at the end of your query.  For example,

     Query:  brown and cow* or "red rooster" >300
     Result:  up to 300 matches will be returned.



These modifications are based upon the publicly available WAIS
source distribution from ftp.think.com, version 8-b5, dated
10 May 92, by Harry Morris, Brewster Kahle and Jonathan Goldman.  

The boolean 'and' and the literal search code was borrowed mostly intact 
from the work done by Tim Gauslin on verson 8-b3 of wais source. 
This source is available thru ftp as
   ridgisd.er.usgs.gov:/software/wais/usgswais.tar
See the USGS_Earth_Science_Data_Directory.src WAIS source for more
details.

Other hacks, several bugs and general mangling of the wais source 
was added by d.g. gilbert (gilbertd@bio.indiana.edu).  These modifications
can (or in a bit) be picked up via ftp or gopher to ftp.bio.indiana.edu.
Look in folder IUBio Software+Data/util/wais  for  iubio-wais-8b5.tar.Z
(full source) or iubio-wais-8b5.tar.patches  for a difference or
patch file.  [As of 5Nov85 I don't have these sources ready yet, try
next week]

-- 
Don Gilbert                                     gilbert@bio.indiana.edu
biocomputing office, biology dept., indiana univ., bloomington, in 47405
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.wais