RE: approx match names

["Howard Chu" <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

Forgive me if this is too obvious, but I would think any database
of this sort ought to be stored in the DIT itself. Maintaining an
external database is just asking for trouble, particularly on the
content-management side of things.

  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
  http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-openldap-devel@OpenLDAP.org
> [mailto:owner-openldap-devel@OpenLDAP.org]On Behalf Of Mark Adamson
> Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 11:23 AM
> To: openldap-devel@OpenLDAP.org
> Subject: approx match names
>
>
> There is a proposal here at CMU that we try to encourage more hits in
> approximate matching of first names by trying to find hits on short forms
> of names. For example, if I search for givenname~=Joe, it would be nice
> if the server found people whose givenname was either Joe or Joseph. This
> will really help with Email recipient name exapansion in a composer's
> To: field.  This could also be used in approx searches of the "cn" field.
> Making it work with exact matches would be trickier.
>
> I'd propose that there be an option to phonetic() to check incoming
> strings to see if they are a short name, and if so, convert it first to
> the long name.  That way all Joe's and Joseph's get turned into
> Joseph. When indexing is done, only the phonetic of "Joseph" is stored,
> and all searches for Joe and Joseph look there.
>
> The list of short name to long name conversions may have to be site
> specific and perhaps even stored in an external config file. Storing them
> in slapd.conf might be a bit cluttersome. But hardcoding the set of names
> into the binary seems unwise for regional and ethnic reasons.
>
> So I'd like to ask if people would find this useful, and if so, how and
> where should the set of short->long name conversions be stored by
> the site?
> Something like share/openldap/nickname
>
> Switching to this system would require reindexing. It could also slow the
> server during approx searches if the list of nicknames was long.
>
>
> -Mark Adamson
>  Carnegie Mellon
>
>