14. The method as claimed in claim 12 , wherein managing the logical associations comprises: locating relevant knowledge base documents relevant to the terms in the query, and determining the logical associations between terms in the query based on the relevant knowledge base documents.
12. A method of managing associations of terms for a search component, the method comprising: reading source business oriented metadata, wherein the source business oriented metadata is included in source metadata documents containing terms to be indexed, and wherein the source business oriented metadata includes an authored topic hierarchy; indexing content of the source business oriented metadata; building, with a computer, a content index of the source business oriented metadata, wherein building the content index comprises, for each term in the source metadata documents, generating a knowledge base representation of the term, and storing, in one or more knowledge base documents, the knowledge base representation of the term along with one or more references to content of the source business oriented metadata that uses the term, and wherein the one or more knowledge base documents include a representation of a structure of the authored topic hierarchy; using the representation of the structure of the authored topic hierarchy to determine logical associations among the terms in the source metadata documents; storing the logical associations in the one or more knowledge base documents; and managing logical associations of terms in a query using the one or more knowledge base documents of the content index, wherein managing the logical associations comprises determining an example association between two terms when a term is an example of another term, combining terms into phrases and determining, based on example associations between terms in the phrases, an example association between two phrases when a phrase is an example of another phrase.