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<div class="section" id="glossary">
<span id="id1"></span><h1>Glossary<a class="headerlink" href="#glossary" title="Permalink to this headline">ΒΆ</a></h1>
<dl class="glossary docutils">
<dt id="term-analysis">Analysis</dt>
<dd>The process of breaking the text of a field into individual <em>terms</em>
to be indexed. This consists of tokenizing the text into terms, and then optionally
filtering the tokenized terms (for example, lowercasing and removing <em>stop words</em>).
Whoosh includes several different analyzers.</dd>
<dt id="term-corpus">Corpus</dt>
<dd>The set of documents you are indexing.</dd>
<dt id="term-documents">Documents</dt>
<dd>The individual pieces of content you want to make searchable.
The word “documents” might imply files, but the data source could really be
anything – articles in a content management system, blog posts in a blogging
system, chunks of a very large file, rows returned from an SQL query, individual
email messages from a mailbox file, or whatever. When you get search results
from Whoosh, the results are a list of documents, whatever “documents” means in
your search engine.</dd>
<dt id="term-fields">Fields</dt>
<dd>Each document contains a set of fields. Typical fields might be “title”, “content”,
“url”, “keywords”, “status”, “date”, etc. Fields can be indexed (so they’re
searchable) and/or stored with the document. Storing the field makes it available
in search results. For example, you typically want to store the “title” field so
your search results can display it.</dd>
<dt id="term-forward-index">Forward index</dt>
<dd>A table listing every document and the words that appear in the document.
Whoosh lets you store <em>term vectors</em> that are a kind of forward index.</dd>
<dt id="term-indexing">Indexing</dt>
<dd>The process of examining documents in the corpus and adding them to the
<em>reverse index</em>.</dd>
<dt id="term-postings">Postings</dt>
<dd>The <em>reverse index</em> lists every word in the corpus, and for each word, a list
of documents in which that word appears, along with some optional information
(such as the number of times the word appears in that document). These items
in the list, containing a document number and any extra information, are
called <em>postings</em>. In Whoosh the information stored in postings is customizable
for each <em>field</em>.</dd>
<dt id="term-reverse-index">Reverse index</dt>
<dd>Basically a table listing every word in the corpus, and for each word, the
list of documents in which it appears. It can be more complicated (the index can
also list how many times the word appears in each document, the positions at which
it appears, etc.) but that’s how it basically works.</dd>
<dt id="term-schema">Schema</dt>
<dd>Whoosh requires that you specify the <em>fields</em> of the index before you begin
indexing. The Schema associates field names with metadata about the field, such
as the format of the <em>postings</em> and whether the contents of the field are stored
in the index.</dd>
<dt id="term-term-vector">Term vector</dt>
<dd>A <em>forward index</em> for a certain field in a certain document. You can specify
in the Schema that a given field should store term vectors.</dd>
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