Zones and Fields

The zone filter in the Verity search engine extracts zones and fields in documents so that they can be searched. The collection administrator defines the zones and fields that are extracted.

What Is a Zone?

Zones are specific regions of a document to which searches can be limited. Using the zone filter, the Verity search engine builds zone information into the collection’s full-word index, which allows quick and efficient searches over zones.

You can search over zones for two specific types of documents:

Markup Language documents. This includes both SGML and HTML . The zone filter includes built-in support for HTML.

Internet Message Format documents. This includes standard email and Usenet news messages.

What Is a Field?

Fields are extracted from the document and stored in the collection for retrieval and searching, and can be returned on a results list. Many commercial word processor applications include fields that can be searched.

A region of text must first be defined as a zone in order to be a field. Depending on how an administrator has defined the collection, a region of text can be only a zone, or it can be both a field and a zone.