rick@kimbal.lynn.ma.us (Rick Kimball) (10/03/90)
Full Text Data Base - Summary of responses to date. I attended to CD-ROM show in Boston yesterday. Many of the firms that supply full-text database APIs were there. Below are some of the marketing blurbs from the show. I received demos of many of the systems below. What I'd like to know is if anyone has used any of these products and what you liked and disliked about them. You should note that even though this was a CD-ROM show all the companies can deal with your database being on either a mag or network disk. Fulcrun Technologies, Inc. 560 Rochester St. Ottawa, Ontario Canada, K1S 5K2 613.238.1761 Fulcrum Ful/Text is a powerful full-text retrieval software package used by CD-ROM producers. In addition to its CD-ROM capabilities, it has been ported to many popular software platforms including DOS, UNIX and VMS and runs on PC's to mainframes. It handles compound documents containing graphics/images and structured/unstructured text. It has rich functionality, excellent performance, low indexing overhead and offers an Application Program Interface. For these reasons. Ful/Text has been selected by several online services and CD-ROM publishers. Ful/Text is the base technology of VU/TEXT's SAVE product, Interleaf's Optical Publishing System, HP LaserROM for technical manuals and OWL's hypertext-based CDWord Library. Personal Library Software, Inc. 15215 Shady Grove Rd., Ste. 204 Rockville, MD 20850 They were showing there MS-Windows 3.0 based full-text database system. They didn't have a blurb. I liked their user interface but right at the moment you can't allow a SUN based user search on a database built by a PC user because of byte swap problems. TMS, Inc. 110 West Third St. Stillwater, OK 74075 TMSFAX, image management software, is a library of software tools for developing applications that involve bi-tonal raster images. TMSFAX provides a broad range of functionality including: compression, decompression, scaling and rotation of bitmapped images. Siunce a decompression board is not required, TMSFAX saves the user the cost of additional hardware. They have combined the above product with a full-text database and call it InnerViews. Verity 1550 Plymouth Street Mountain View, CA 94043 415.960.7600 415.906.7698 FAX TOPIC is the first concept-based search and retireval system to provide speed, accuracy ans ease of use needed to access text and image data in today's networked and computing environment. The API is a library of C functions. It enables software developers to embed TOPIC text retrieval functionality in their end user applications. It provides access to TOPIC database creation and management; to TOPIC creation and editing; to TOPIC retrieval and relevance-ranking; and , to the modules which make documents viewable by the user. I like the way they handle the lanunching of external programs and the ability to index fields in my INGRES database without having to copy the text into the TOPIC's database.