ordindexering

Ordindexering, also known as term indexing or keyword indexing, is a process used in information retrieval and computer science to create a structured representation of textual data. The primary goal is to efficiently organize and search through large volumes of text. It involves identifying significant words or terms within a document and associating them with the document itself. These terms act as keys, allowing users or systems to quickly locate relevant documents without having to scan the entire collection.

The process typically begins with text preprocessing. This can include steps like tokenization, where the text is broken down into individual words, and stop word removal, where common words like "the," "a," and "is" are eliminated as they are unlikely to be discriminative. Stemming or lemmatization may also be applied to reduce words to their root form, ensuring that variations of the same word are treated as equivalent.

Once the significant terms are identified, an index is built. This index can take various forms, but a common one is an inverted index. An inverted index lists each unique term and then provides a list of all documents that contain that term. This structure allows for rapid searching. For example, if a user searches for a specific term, the system can directly access the list of documents associated with that term in the inverted index, rather than having to read through every document. Ordindexering is a fundamental technique underpinning search engines, library catalogs, and many other information management systems.