FAQ: How do hot topics work? - gasboys.net - resource sharing for anaesthetic trainees

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How do hot topics work?

As of late 2006, the PETi database holds almost 7000 questions (also called 'facts' in the PETi database.)

A way of indexing these facts will make it easier in the future for others to contribute to the question collection.

To enable this task gasboys is deploying some advanced indexing techniques.

In essence, index relies on a hierarchy (or more correctly, a 'directed acyclic graph) of 'concepts'. Each concept has some 'searches' defined to match keywords against concepts. The concept hierarchy allows grouping related concepts together into broad categories.

Some of these categories are marked as 'topical', and this enables users to select them, as a 'hot topic' when they log in.

The searches are based on MySQL text matching functions, so that:

cardiac heart: Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.
+ischaemic +heart: Find rows that contain both words.
+neck -femur: Find rows that contain the word "neck" but not "femur''
myocard*: Find rows that contain words such as "myocardial", "myocardium", "myocarditis
"some words": Find rows that contain the exact phrase ``some words'' (for example, rows that contain ``some words of wisdom'' but not ``some noise words'').