Each topic and its associated subtopics form a hierarchical parent and child relationship. In the example below, the subtopics performing-arts, film, visual-arts, and video are children of the art topic. The art topic itself is a child of the liberal-arts topic. The liberal-arts topic could in turn be a child of successively higher parent topics within the structure.
When you use a topic to perform a search, the subject area defined by the topic includes its subtopics, their subtopics, and so on, down to the evidence topics of the structure. Topics that are not direct descendants of the topic you use are not included in the search.
In the example above, for instance, a search using the film topic would cause the Verity search engine to find documents containing information on film, motion pictures, movies, and art films. In this example, the search would not find documents related to the performing-arts, visual-arts, or video topics since these topics are not children, of the film topic. However, if the art topic was used, the search would find documents related to all the art topic’s children, which includes performing-arts, film, visual-arts, and video.
