improve gs1 voc search

[VladimirAlexiev]

@mgh128 @philarcher

• go to https://www.gs1.org/voc/
• search for "port"
• it returns a bunch of irrelevant voc terms with words like opportunities, Support, importation

Please improve the search by:

• using prefix search (eg in perl the regex would be /\bport/i )
• if possible, using a more advanced stemming ("port" will already find "ports" but English has slightly more elaborate stemming rules)

[mgh128]

Hi @VladimirAlexiev

Thanks for the suggestion. We can improve the tool by using a prefix search as you suggest ( /b{keyword}/i ) We can only really make that update the next time the GS1 Web vocabulary is updated - so that's likely to be February 2022 when the GLN-related extra terms are added.

Regarding stemming, we'll keep it in mind for the next major update to the tool, when we plan to move away from the current PHP+JavaScript approach, toward a JavaScript-only (+Vue.js) implementation - so I'll look into word stemming libraries for JavaScript - but we'd need to test those to see how large they are (in terms of file size) and how well they work. For example, can they identify that the plural of 'mouse' is 'mice' and vice versa. The downside to such word stemming is that if/when we add multi-lingual translated definitions for terms, we'd need such a word stemming library to be truly multi-lingual and because it would need to handle exceptions (such as 'mouse' <-> 'mice') I'd expect it to include quite a large dictionary of exceptions per human language.