Subject: "Intelligent" text search & The Daily MOI From: curtmonash@monash.com (Curt A. Monash) Date: Wed, 06 Nov 1996 17:54:10 -0500

Cc: johnb@iac.net
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John Byczkowski raised (in effect) the subject of intelligent search of text
databases.
A full discussion would NOT be short.  But to be (relatively) brief:

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While the popular search engines are NOT necessarily at the technical state
of the art, they are at least accessible, and so are a good starting point
for discussions.  Check out, for instance, Excite, UltraInfoSeek, AltaVista,
and TechWeb, including the Advanced Search options where available.

Software vendors that DO have state of the art technology, more or less,
include Verity (especially if you add in their partner SageWare), Fulcrum,
Excalibur, Oracle (the ConText product), and IsoQuest.  Unfortunately,
however, the state of the art is not very satisfying.

Most or all of these sites and companies can be reached through the obvious
URLs (http://www.itsnamehere.com).

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In addition, I'll pull a Rosalind here and refer you to a few of our own
articles):

        The Spider's Apprentice, an ever-more-popular user's guide to search
engines (written and maintained by Linda Barlow) --
http://www.monash.com/spidap.html

        An article on Universal Servers, which addresses the integration of
text and relational databases (warning, this and the next article were
written for software industry professionals, and a technical background is
assumed) -- http://www.monash.com/udbms.html

        The Technology of Meaning & the Daily MOI, where "MOI" stands for
"Meaning-Oriented Interface" -- http://www.monash.com/moi.html

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In conclusion (as Bill Clinton says all too reluctantly), here's an excerpt
from the Daily MOI article.

"Consider, for example, a salesman or consulting manager sitting in a hotel
room, preparing for a sales call. Would he have the patience to log onto the
Net, start from AltaVista, and surf for a couple of hours, hoping to unearth
a few nuggets of useful information?  [Not bloody likely!]  Would he zoom to
a menu of 25 information sources, each focused on his sales prospect, and
look through three or four of them?  You betcha!  And a similar case ...
could be made on behalf of online publishing=97the much-heralded Daily Me
will, I believe, in fact turn out to be the Daily MOI."






Curt A. Monash, Ph.D. || curtmonash@monash.com || http://www.monash.com ||
617-861-8700=20
President, Monash Information Services || Editor and Publisher, Monash
Software Letter

My ISP used to be entirely unreliable.  Recently, however, they've improved.=
 =20
Now they're only unreliable some of the time.

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