Stopwords

Stopwords

Stopwords are words which are not indexed by Calm. By default Calm will index every word in your Calm records unless you use a Stopword list to exclude some words from the index.

It may be useful to use Stopwords if there are terms which occur frequently in your database that you do not wish to find when searching. Common words to have in the stopword list are the, and, with, etc. The advantage of adding such words to a Stopword list is that it saves time when indexing your database and makes searching more efficient.

Using a Stopword List

If are not currently using a stopword list and wish to use one:

• Open the Admin program
   
• To add a stopword list for just one database, open the relevant database (Open on the File drop down menu) and select Re-index from the File drop down menu.
  To add a stopword list for all databases, select Re-index All from the File drop down menu.
   
• Underneath the Stopword List box, click on the Browse button, you will be given the opportunity to search for a file
   
• Navigate to the Dscribe/Archive folder and select the file stopword.lst.

Editing the Stopword List

To edit or add words to the stopword list used by Calm:

• Open the Admin program
   
• To edit a stopword list for just one database, open the relevant database (Open on the File drop down menu) and select Re-index from the File drop down menu.

To edit a stopword list used for all databases, select Re-index All from the File drop down menu.
• Underneath the Stopword List box, click on the button
  
• Insert any new Stopwords, one on each line, Please note that it is easier to maintain the stopword list if you keep the Stopwords in alphabetical order. Take care not to add terms to the stopword list that you or other users of Calm might need to use in searching later. Terms need to appear frequently to make their removal from the index worthwhile
• Remove any terms that you want to appear in the index from the stopword list

Please note that every time you make a change to the stopword list, you are changing the rules by which Calm indexes its databases. You will therefore have to re-index any databases that use the stopword list before the changes will take effect.