Thanks for the input so far.

Ben, another problem with digestibility of the search results is that it's
not XHTML, and therefore not well-formed XML, making it impossible to
process with XPath.

I think I'll experiment with the Solr solution, but like the AutoSuggester
being developed at OCLC, the index would be fairly static unless there was a
way to pull updates from LOC into it.

Ethan

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:43 AM, LeVan,Ralph <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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.
> > >
>