Questions about the capabilities and limitations of the use of free text in authority searches are common.
Free text search is especially important for taking advantage of career information, keywords, policies, or areas of economic activity (values taken from predefined lists), as these lists are not currently displayed for searches and can only be used for free text search. However, this form of search has strong limitations that must be known to use it properly:
- The system you use is not ‘Google’ type but much simpler. The text we write is searched ‘as is’ within all fields (short and long description, keywords, political and economic areas, professions, etc.) that describe an authority.
- If we write several words, look for the chain formed by all of them and in the order in which we have written it (‘noise pollution’ would locate results but ‘noise pollution’ would not). For the same reason, it can happen that ‘extremadura X-ray’ does not produce any results (although there is an authority that appears in the list when searching separately for both ‘X-ray’ and ‘extremadura’).
- It does not distinguish uppercase/lowercase (‘Medical’, ‘Medical’, and ‘MEDICAL’ will offer the same results).
- Unfortunately it is sensitive to the use of tilde (‘MEDICO’ does not offer the same results as ‘MEDICO’)
- The use of plural/singular sometimes makes searching difficult. Thus ‘architects’ may not locate any authority, while ‘architect’ does (in other words there may be greater differences between singular and plural forms – especially in other languages: 'foot/feet' for example).
- Only the root (or any other part) of a term can be used (‘architec’ would locate results that contain architect or architecture, and ‘ntaminac’ would locate results that contain contamination)
- It does not use any dictionary of synonyms, let alone any thesaurus (searching for ‘pollution’ and ‘pollution’ does not offer the same results)
- Caution should be exercised with the multilingual issue in the free text search:
- Translations of unofficial designations and descriptions may take (up to a month) to complete, and even if they are available they may have used different words than the ones we are initially applying in searches (the example of pollution vs. pollution).
- The system does know the translations of all key words (keywords), professions, political and economic areas (ultimately from the ‘lists’ contained in IMI), but we must write them as they appear in the lists of IMI (p.ej. there is a political area of ‘pollution’ that in English IMI presents as ‘polution’, we would never locate an authority looking for ‘polution’)
- As a practical example, the economic activity area E.39.0.0 is described in Spanish as ‘Decontamination activities and other waste management services’ while in English it appears as ‘Remediation activities and other waste management services’. It is clear that looking for ‘decontamination’ the system would not have found the authorities that are described as ‘remediation’.
In short, the use of the option for free text in searches is a support but it must be used with imagination and intelligence when we cannot locate competent authorities with it.