Mary and all Law-libers
I got to attend a roll out of the new Freestyle product in Dallas
yesterday. The product does look pretty good and does offer a couple of
bells and whistles that WIN does not, such as the .where and .when
commands (or was that a .why and .who ? - no, I think I was right the
first time) allowing you to see where the words searched appear (unlike
boolean logic, Freestyle allows you to retrieve items that _do not_
contain all the words in your request - depends on the weight given the
words by the algorithm.
An interesting statement was made at the rollout - the VP of development
(I do not remember his name but he was a very smooth speaker) stated that
their intent was not to promote Freestyle over boolean, particularly in
the law schools, but to encourage the learning of boolean first, _and
then_ to promote Freestyle. Very interesting approach, if that is indeed
what happens. I, for one, think that there is too much "black box"
approach to natural language and that type of "magical thinking" should be
discouraged by learning boolean first.
One of the Mead rollout people, Laura Horn (?), stated that they wanted to
emphasize that this was not magic or AI but simply a mathmatical weighting
of terms based on location and occurance and that that was what their reps
would be told to say when they take this to the streets.
Mary, nothing was said about promotion in the schools but that the reps
woudl be trained beginning next week and that promotion woudl take place
after that. Nothing said about availability dates to schools (though
there was some vague reference to amending the schools agreements to
contain the Freestyle feature). You might want to contact Rita Dermody at
TExas Weslayan as she was there and might have been listening better than
I for the school viewpoint.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Karl T. Gruben * Internet vinelk@class.org *
Vinson & Elkins * Telephone 713-758-2679 *
1001 Fannin * Fax 713-758-2346 *
Houston, Texas 77002-6760 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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