Broader-term search
Heurist’s hierarchichal term trees allow searches on broader terms which will automatically find narrower terms. For instance, in the Expert Nation database we can search for specific architectural degrees or, by choosing the broader term Architecture, we can search for all architectural degrees:
Broader-term searches also pull in narrower terms two or more steps down the tree.
Multilingual search
The same technique can be used to provide simple multilingual searches on terms which may be entered in a number of different languages. If equivalent terms in several languages are entered under a standard term (in the primary language of the database), terms can then be entered in any of the languages supported, and a search on the standard term (easily selected by scrolling up to the parent) will retrieve all records using the term in any of the supported languages.
Where the languages are not immediately distinctive, terms can be entered as e.g. Cy: cryno, Fr: fleuron, Nl: kruisbloem etc. (this approach has the advantage of maintaining the terms in the same order for every standard term.
Other approaches
Heurist also has built in database structure for full multilingual equivalences of record types, fields and terms. However this function has not been fully implemented as there has not so-far been sufficient demand. In many cases, the technique described above will prove adequate.