Re: [Gnumed-devel] patient search functionality revisited

[Ian Haywood]

On Thu, 2 Jan 2003 01:19:17 +0100
Karsten Hilbert <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Don't you have any phonetic sear ch algorithms? At least for English
> > there are
> > a number of reasonable phonetic search algorithms available ("soundex"), =
> > even in postgres/contrib
> I know. I am not immediately aware of any phoneme reducers for
> German. I will do some research on those in due time, though.
> Theoretically, soundex should be trainable for all languages
> reasonably phoneto-structurally close to English.
> 
> However, soundex will happen in a third level query or in a
> second level one at the earliest if the user so desires. I am
> trying to catch the common cases first in 1st/2nd level
> queries. Of course, 1st level queries that don't return any
> hits will be escalated to second level automatically. Same for
> second to third level.

There is also a function levenshtein () which I found useful:
it gives the number of substitutions required to match two strings, so
is language-agnostic. 

It would also be good to support nicknames, as some people (Australians in 
particular)
are notorious for using them to exclusion.

Ian

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