This article is a summary of our April 26 roundtable on using a thesaurus to enhance the performance of search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS 2007). Paul Rosenberg, intranet search specialist at a casualty insurance company, discussed how he adapted the Wordnet thesaurus to add replacement and expansion word pairs to MOSS search. Other participants, some with extensive SharePoint use, shared their comments and questions as well. Topics covered include:

• What is the role of a thesaurus in search?
• What is MOSS 2007 and what are its primary search enhancements?
• How can a thesaurus improve MOSS 2007 search performance?
• How did Paul convert WordNet (an open source thesaurus) in SharePoint's format?
• Comments and questions from participants.

The role of a thesaurus in search
Because computers can't understand word meanings and grammatical variations (e.g. singular vs. plural) the way that humans can, search engines must be given explicit instructions about how to process them.

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Created on May 8, 2007 l Updated on December 1, 2008