Keyword groups provide a way to group your keywords to facilitate finding keywords in a large index. You probably don't need to use keyword groups when creating a new Knowbase data file, but as the number of keywords grows, they are useful for managing your index. In fact, the Keyword Groups column of the Index Window is hidden by default.

 

A keyword group is like a set of keywords. Each keyword can belong to any number of groups or to no groups at all.

 

Keyword groups do not form a hierarchy of categories, since you have only one level of groups and since keywords can belong to one, many, or no groups. However, you can imitate a two-level hierarchy by assigning all keywords to exactly one group each.

 

Articles are not directly associated with groups, but may be considered indirectly associated with any group which is associated with at least one of the article's assigned keywords.

 

Using Keyword Groups

 

The purpose of keyword groups is to more quickly locate keywords by reducing the number of keywords in the Index column of the Index Window to those belonging to only one or a few categories of keywords. Essentially, by highlighting keyword groups, you filter which keywords are showing in the same way that you filter which article titles are showing by selecting keywords.

 

To show the Keyword Groups column in the Index Window, use Keyword Groups command (View Menu). To create or delete keyword groups or to change which keywords are members of a group, use the Manage Keyword Groups command (Keyword Menu).

 

When the Keyword Groups column is not showing or when no keyword group names are highlighted in that column, then all keywords are shown in the Index column (according to the current Index Mode).

 

When you highlight the name of one keyword group in the Keyword Groups column, only keywords belonging to that group appear in the Index column.

 

When you highlight multiple groups, all the keywords belonging to at least one of the highlighted groups appear in the Index column. To highlight multiple groups, see Selecting Multiple List Items.

 

To quickly remove the highlights from all groups current highlighted, right-click on the Keyword Groups column and select the Unselect Keyword Groups command from the pop-up menu.

 

You can also filter available keywords by groups in many dialog boxes which use keywords and edit which groups a keyword belongs to.

 

 

Examples

 

For example, you may want to divide your keywords into broad groups like "work" and "personal". Keywords like meeting and phone report would only be members of the "work" group. Family- and music-related keywords would only be in the "personal" group. But keywords like book would belong to both groups, since some book reviews and other book-related topics could be business-related and others personal.

 

 

In another example, say you have a Knowbase data file storing recipes. You might have keywords for types of recipes like desserts, appetizers, and drinks. Other keywords might help you locate recipes using certain ingredients like corn, milk, or banana. Still other keywords might help you locate recipes for different meals like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

 

In this case, you might create keyword groups called "courses", "ingredients", and "meals" with member keywords like this:

 

 

Then when you need to find a recipe using corn, you could first highlight the group "ingredients" to reduce the Index column to only the keywords which were ingredients. Then it would be easy to find corn. Selecting the keyword corn would list the relevant recipes in the Titles column.

 

 

For more information about keyword groups, see these Procedures:

Creating a Group of Related Keywords

Listing Keywords for All Keyword Groups

Listing All Articles Related to a Keyword Group