Here in OCLC Research we've been experimenting with AutoSuggester
services. The folks in charge of our copy of LCSH are considering
putting up an AutoSuggester for that. I'll let you know in the next
couple of days how that goes.

To make the service work at keystroke speeds, we've had to precalculate
the responses and load them into a database of their own. We walk
through the database that we're building the AutoSuggester for, pulling
out 4-tuples of data: the term to be suggested, the recordID associated
with the term (in case multiple terms might be suggested for the same
record), a weight for the term and a string of other arbitrary data to
send along with the recommendation (in the case of our VIAF
AutoSuggester, that's a list of authority control numbers). Those
tuples are then evaluated to generate a list of the 10 best terms that
match each keystroke combination and that list is turned into a record
and the keystroke combination is the key to that record. We then load
those records into a simple text database indexing on the keystroke
combination. We front-end that database with a simple service and we're
done.

The only downside to this scheme is that the AutoSuggester database is
relatively static.

Ralph

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of
> Ethan Gruber
> Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 11:14 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Auto-suggest and the id.loc.gov LCSH web
service
>
> It doesn't seem very efficient. It is taking me at least 30 seconds
to load
> a page of 'a*' in http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/
>
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Houghton,Andrew <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of
> > > Winona Salesky
> > > Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 11:00 AM
> > > To: [log in to unmask]
> > > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Auto-suggest and the id.loc.gov LCSH web
> > > service
> > >
> > > Quoting Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]>:
> > >
> > > > I have a need to integrate the LCSH terms into a web form that
uses
> > > > auto-suggest to control the vocabulary. Is this technically
possible
> > > with
> > > > the id.loc.gov service?
> >
> > Why can't you just add a "*" to the end of the data in your search
form
> > and send the request to the id.loc.gov search, per:
> >
> > <http://id.loc.gov/authorities/techcenter/searching.html>
> >
> > then parse the response?
> >
> >
> > Andy.
> >