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On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Ed Summers <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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]. > This would certainly be a possibility for other projects, but the use case we're immediately concerned with requires an authority file that's maintained by our local archives. It contains all kinds of information about people (degrees, nicknames, etc) as well as terminology which is not technically kosher but which we know people use. Ideally, we'd map nonpreferred terms to preferred terms on the fly, but when you're keyword matching queries that contain more than one term/concept, it gets a bit stickier. Also, we don't want the vocab to recommend or map to any term that won't actually lead to an item. Plus there's always the big catch -- maintenance. Creative stuff is fun, but reverse engineering clever work later is a real bear. I couldn't agree with you more that minimizing dependencies and building in elegant degradation are essential to good design. kyle