[PW] Re: "sounds like" searching

[Fred Acerri]

Barring talking to a doctor, another health professional, or medical library 
perhaps if the patron knew what the medication was for one could do a 
MedSearch and use "truncating."

Fred A
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kay Lancaster" <kay at fern.com>
To: "Stumpers List" <list at project-wombat.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 02, 2006 1:33 PM
Subject: [PW] Re: "sounds like" searching


> On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Michelle Hawk wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know of a way to find a word (in this case, a medication),
>> when the patron only knows what the word sounds like, but really doesn't
>
> There's a coding method called "soundex" and another called "metaphone"
> useful for indexing names, but I don't know of anything similar for
> medications or other purposes.  In this instance, I'd be likely to
> ask my pharmacist or maybe a doctor -- giving them any additional
> clues like what the med is for, and is it experimental or on the market.
>
> http://www.creativyst.com/Doc/Articles/SoundEx1/SoundEx1.htm
> http://aspell.net/metaphone/
> http://www.codeproject.com/string/dmetaphone6.asp
>
> Netrics is a recent computer program used for "dirty" data searches,
> but it's proprietary:
> http://www.netrics.com/info/search/soundex2.shtml
>
> Kay
>
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