The ActiveMath Search Tool | return |
The role of the ActiveMath search tool is to make the complete learning content of the ActiveMath installation accessible to learners by means of the search paradigm. One wishes to search for plain text, for mathematical formulae and for item characteristics, with reasonable tolerance and get results presented within the tool, as well as single search matches to be displayed.
A simple search is offered where words will be matched both exactly and fuzzily. This search mode also has an elaborate syntax, typically of good use to authors. An advanced search mode is also offered where forms allow the edition of precise queries to the content items. A screenshot of this mode is below.
Challenges and Originality
The ActiveMath search tool is among the only tools to search mathematical formulae. It does so semantically, based on the OpenMath representation, and allows wildcard queries which many term. Moreover, the search tool integrates all techniques as a coherent, learner-friendly, and complete search tool by carefully ranking the matches in specific fields of the OMDoc items and their types.
Compared to the MathWeb and the DLMF search tool, ActiveMath is more learner-oriented and combines all query types. Compared to the DLMF search tool, ActiveMath is more generic since it makes no assumptions about the type of mathematical objects which could lead to possibly abusive normalizations such as the commuatitivity of multiplication.
Implementation
The ActiveMath search tool uses a Lucene index with carefully selected scoring and and analysis method converting the OMDoc documents along with OpenMath formulae into streams of tokens. The resulting performance is very acceptable.