I think that Mike Giarlo and Michael Witt used the FAST AutoSuggest as
part of their databib project [1]. But are you talking about bringing
the data down for a local index?

//Ed

[1] http://databib.org/

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Bill Dueber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Has anyone created a nice little wrapper around FAST? I'd like to test out
> including FAST subjects in our catalog, but am hoping someone else went
> through the work of building the code to do it :-) I know FAST has a web
> interface, but I've got about 10M records and would rather use something
> local.
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Ed Summers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Kyle,
>>
>> If you are thinking of doing name or subject authority control you
>> might want to check out OCLC's VIAF AutoSuggest service [1] and FAST
>> AutoSuggest [2]. There are also autosuggest searches for the name and
>> subject authority files, that are lightly documented in their
>> OpenSearch document [3].
>>
>> In general, I really like this approach, and I think it has a lot of
>> potential for newer cataloging interfaces. I'll describe two scenarios
>> that I'm familiar with, that have worked quite well (so far). Note,
>> these aren't IR per-se, but perhaps they will translate to your
>> situation.
>>
>> As part of the National Digital Newspaper Program LC has a simple app
>> so that librarians can create "essays" that describe newspapers in
>> detail. Rather than making this part of our public website we created
>> an Essay Editor as a standalone django app that provides a web based
>> editing environment, for authority the essays. Part of this process is
>> linking up the essay with the correct newspaper. Rather than load all
>> the newspapers that could be described into the Essay Editor, and keep
>> them up to date, we exposed an OpenSearch API in the main Chronicling
>> America website (where all the newspaper records are loaded and
>> maintained) [4]. It has been working quite well so far.
>>
>> Another example is the jobs.code4lib.org website that allows people to
>> enter jobs announcements. I wanted to make sure that it was possible
>> to view jobs by organization [5], or skill [6] -- so some form of
>> authority control was needed. I ended up using Freebase Suggest [7]
>> that makes it quite easy to build simple forms that present users with
>> subsets of Freebase entities, depending on what they type. A nice side
>> benefit of using Freebase is that you get descriptive text and images
>> for the employers and topics for free. It has been working pretty well
>> so far. There is a bit of an annoying conflict between the Freebase
>> CSS and Twitter Bootstrap, which might be resolved by updating
>> Bootstrap. Also, I've noticed Freebase's service slowing down a bit
>> lately, which hopefully won't degrade further.
>>
>> The big caveat here is that these external services are dependencies.
>> If they go down, a significant portion of your app might go down to.
>> Minimizing this dependency, or allowing things degrade well is good to
>> keep in mind. Also, it's worth remembering identifiers (if they are
>> available) for the selected matches, so that they can be used for
>> linking your data with the external resource. A simple string might
>> change.
>>
>> I hope this helps. Thanks for the question, I think this is an area
>> where we can really improve some of our back-office interfaces and
>> applications.
>>
>> //Ed
>>
>> [1]
>> http://www.oclc.org/developer/documentation/virtual-international-authority-file-viaf/request-types#autosuggest
>> [2] http://experimental.worldcat.org/fast/assignfast/
>> [3] http://id.loc.gov/authorities/opensearch/
>> [4] http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/api/#autosuggest
>> [5]
>> http://jobs.code4lib.org/employer/university-of-illinois-at-urbana-champaign/
>> [6] http://jobs.code4lib.org/jobs/ruby/
>> [7] http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Freebase_Suggest
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>> > How are libraries doing this and how well is it working?
>> >
>> > Most systems that even claim to have authority control simply allow a
>> > controlled keyword list. But this does nothing for the see and see also
>> > references that are essential for many use cases (people known by many
>> > names, entities that change names, merge or whatever over time, etc).
>> >
>> > The two most obvious solutions to me are to write an app that provides
>> this
>> > information interactively as the query is typed (requires access to the
>> > search box) or to have a record that serves as a disambiguation page
>> (might
>> > not be noticed by the user for a variety of reasons). Are there other
>> > options, and what do you recommend?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > kyle
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Bill Dueber
> Library Systems Programmer
> University of Michigan Library