Another good Boxes and Arrows article by Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel is up. Synonym Rings and Authority Files is part 3 of a series on Controlled Vocabularies and faceted classification. This is some heavy duty IA stuff.
The whole series is:
* All About Facets and Controlled Vocabularies (intro)
* What is a Controlled Vocabulary?
* Creating a Controlled Vocabulary.
* Synonym Rings and Authority Files.
Synonym rings and authority files (which are impressive words to use in a meeting) are just simple files and tools that help out people when searching.
This excellent article talks about the nature of synonyms, and how to help determine what your synonym ring should consist of. It also goes into what Authority files are, and how it can really help out your search results.
The end result of implementing this sort of system is a greatly improved search results page, which will generally increase the usability of the site by the users a drastic amount. Easy to implement? Not particularly. Worthwhile? Quite possibly. It's defintely something that you should be aware of though.