This morning at the Online/CD-ROM 93 conference in
Washington several new and forthcoming products were
unveiled. The theme was definitely user friendliness.
Lexis: unveiled its new natural language technology which
they are calling "Freestyle." An associative retrieval
algorithm ranks documents in order of relevancy. After
processing your natural language search, the system displays
the results and a menu of choices which allows you to either
review the results or further refine your search by
selecting from a list of options such as identifying
mandatory terms or entering date restrictiors. One
interesting feature called "superkwic" allows you to select
the most statistically relevant documents. A feature called
"where" which allows you to review a graphical table showing
which of your search terms appear in which of the 25 most
relevant documents.
Dow Jones: Unveiled "Text Search Plus" software. which
provides a graphical user interface which vastly simplifies
source selection and query formulation. In addition, it
allows you to prepare searches before going on-line. For
novice end users there is a "search builder" function which
is a fill-in-the-blanks boolean screen.
Dialog: Showed off "Target" a new search command which
performs relevancy ranking either as part of your initial
search or as a way of filtering a previous search result.
Target allows you to influence the weighting of search terms
and to flag mandatory search terms.
Thomson & Thomson: announced the release over the next year
of international trademark databases including trademark
registries for 12 European Countries and the "International
Register" which includes registrations for the 30 WIPO
countries worldwide.
AT&T: Showed off "Rightpages" which is an image based online
system which allows users to set up a profile and recieve
e-mail notification when documents matching their profile
appear in journals. Users can scan talbes of contents of
journals and through a hypertext link view high resolution
images of articles.
OCLC: Will offer "Contents Alert" allowing libraries to
subscribe to tables-of-contents which they will disseminate
or allow individuals to get tables-of-contents directly.
West Publishing: annuonced a new 2.0 version of their
Premise software, which is their cd-rom search engine. This
new version of Premise in addition to being more user
friendly will be available for the first time on Macintosh
and Windows platforms.
RR Bowker: Is entering into a joint venture with OCLC and
will offer global "Books in Print" databases. In addition
they will accept EDI transmissions allowing OCLC subscribers
to order books electronically and providing a download of
the cataloging information when the book order is placed.
DEC: Announced it's Infoserver 1000 which in addition to
being a CD-ROM server in a LAN environment will allow you
to master your own CD-ROM.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03/09/00 PST