[Zope-dev] ZCatalog and 'fuzzy logic'

[Ken Manheimer]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Morten W. Petersen wrote:

> > I do not think that "fuzzy logic" is strongly related to "regexp-like".
> > Anyway.
> > 
> > Fuzzy searching often means "finding matches with characters omitted,
> > replaced or inserted".
> 
> It seems I misunderstood the term fuzzy logic myself.  Fuzzy logic means
> if I search for a word, for example 'programmer', it will return matches
> to the words 'program', 'programming','programmable' etc.

I think your talking about something else.  Last i checked, "fuzzy logic"
was a logical algebra based on the existence of intermediate truth states,
between "true" and "false".  It has little or nothing to do with
aproximate searching, though i guess you could use it to make assertions
about the aproximations.  I think what you all are talking about is "fuzzy
matching".

> I.e., it will somewhat intelligently return words that are similar in
> what they mean, using grammar rules (chopping off endings of words and
> making them match others).

There are also matching mechanisms like soundex, that account for
misspelling by translating words to phonetic-equivalent normalized codes,
and comparing on that basis.

Ken
klm@digicool.com