Vocabulary structure

["Ciar<a'>n <O'> Duibh<i'>n" <Csg0070@QUEENS-BELFAST.AC.UK>]

I am (possibly) interested in Lojban, to find out if its vocabulary can
be a useful way of indexing text in a database.  I mean, could one
take a sentence of text in a natural language (English?) and think up
a small number of Lojban words which represent its meaning (the words
of a Lojban translation of the sentence, possibly), and use an index of
these Lojban words to find sentences in the English text which contain a
particular concept?  The problem with an index based directly on the
English words (or on a translation into another natural language) is not
just with inflection etc but more importantly with the large number of
synonyms and near-synonyms, and terms more or less semantically related,
i.e. there are so many ways to say nearly the same thing in an NL.
Can anyone say if the vocabulary of Lojban simplifies or systematises
the semantic relationships between words in such a way that they would
be more effective as an index?

A second question: in my efforts to find out something about Lojban
vocabulary I downloaded a file called lf1293.zip (I think) from
ftp.cs.yale.edu.  What program do I need to use the files contained
in this zip archive?

Ciara/n O/ Duibhi/n.