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Territorial Policy

Search for Authorities: Use of Free Text

21/05/2009

Questions on the capacity and limitations of the use of free text in authority searches are common.

Free text searches are particularly important in order to take advantage of information on professions, key words, policies or areas of economic activity (values that are taken from pre-defined lists), as searches are not yet shown in these lists and only free text searches can be carried out at present. However, this type of searches has serious limitations which you must be aware of in order to use this option properly:
  • The system used is not like ‘Google’, but is much simpler. The text entered is searched for ‘as such’ within all fields (short and long description, key words, political and economic areas, professions, etc.) that describe an authority.
  • If several words are entered, the search is carried out as a chain in the order in which they are entered (‘acoustic contamination” will find results but “contamination acoustic” will not). For this reason, ‘radiography Extremadura’ may not find any results (although an authority appears on the list when searching for ‘radiography’ and ‘Extremadura’ separately).
  • It is not case sensitive (‘doctor’, ‘Doctor’, and ‘DOCTOR’ will provide the same results).
  • Unfortunately, it is sensitive to the use of accents (‘MEDICO’ does not provide the same results as ‘MÉDICO’)
  • At times, the use of plural/singular hinders the searches. Therefore ‘architects’ may not locate any authority, whilst “architect” does (for other expressions, there may be greater differences between the singular and plural forms – particularly in other languages: 'foot/feet' for example).
  • You may use the root (or any other part) of an expression (‘architec’ will locate the results that contain “architect” or “architecture”, and ‘ntaminac’ will find the results containing “contamination”)
  • It does not use a synonyms dictionary or a thesaurus (searching for “contamination” and for “pollution” will not provide the same results)
  • Care must be taken over the multi-lingual question in the search for free text: 
    • Translations of informal titles and descriptions may take up to one month, and even though they are available, different words may have been used to those initially being entered in the searches (the example of contamination vs. pollution).
    • The system knows the translation of all the keywords, professions, political and economic areas (in short: the lists included in the IMI), but we must enter them exactly as they appear on the IMI lists (for example, there is a  ‘contaminación’  political area which the IMI displays as ‘pollution’ in English. Searching for “polución” we will not find any authority).
    • As a practical example, the economic area of activity E.39.0.0 is described in Spanish as ‘Actividades de descontaminación y otros services de gestión de residuos’ whilst it appears in English as ‘Remediation activities and other waste management services’. It is clear that searching for ‘decontamination’ (a valid term in English), the system would not have found the authorities that are described as ‘remediation’.
In short, the use of the free text option in searches is a support tool but it must be used imaginatively and intelligently when we fail to identify competent authorities with it.