When you assign a weight to a child, keep in mind that the weight you use reflects the importance of a child to its parent topic. The matched documents will be ranked by importance to the search; thus, your selection results are directly affected by the weights you assign. If you change a weight, your selection results will be changed, as well.
Example:
The topic boeing-people includes three weighted children, binder, shrontz, and woodard, as shown below.
These subtopics are assigned various weights, as follows: the child binder is assigned a weight of 0.80, since this child is considered to be the most important of the three. The subtopic hitsman is assigned a "median" weight of 0.50, since this child is reasonably important with respect to the other two children. The subtopic johnson is assigned a low weight of 0.30, since this child is considered to be the least important with respect to the other children.
When the topic boeing-people is used for a search, the Verity search engine assumes that if the phrase "Paul Binder" is located within a document, there is a high probability that the document will be relevant to a search which uses the topic boeing-people. Documents which contain the phrase "Frank Shrontz" will be reasonably relevant to this search; documents which contain the phrase "Ron Woodard" will be the least relevant.
Because the topic boeing-people has been assigned the ACCRUE operator, the documents displayed at the top of the results list will be those which contain the greatest number of children; therefore all documents with references to all three people will be given the most importance. Documents which contain just one name will be selected in an order that reflects the weights of each child. Thus, because the binder child has the highest weight, documents which include only one individual will be ranked by those which refer to Paul Binder first, followed by Frank Shrontz, and finally Ron Woodard.
