Integrated categories and full-text search

[Nick Arnett]

At 03:01 AM 2/20/97 -0800, Leonard Will wrote:
...
>As well as having classified lists for browsing and broad search uses, I
>fully accept the need for specific indexing terms (from a thesaurus) to
>be applied to items to allow specific retrieval, normally using software
>which allows these terms to be combined at the time of searching. 
>
>These two approaches, and free text searching, are all complementary,
>and we need sites to implement them all in an integrated way; it is not
>an either/or choice.

We've just shown this kind of integration, we think for the first time, at
least in a commercial product (or product-to-be).  Several corporate
librarians have been involved in the design review, as well as publishers.
The librarians are hoping that this tool will make it practical to organize
Intranet resources; the publishers are mostly looking at "mining the
Internet" with the tool.

There's a press release describing it here:

http://www.verity.com/PR/970212.html

One difference from physical shelves -- our taxonomies are hierarchical.
This means that when we display search results on a 2-D map, it also has
hidden depth.  You can click on a category and see the results for that
category mapped onto the child categories.

Nick

---------------------------------------
Verity Inc.
Connecting People with Information

Product Manager, Categorization and Visualization
408-542-2164; fax 408-541-1600; home office 408-733-7613
http://www.verity.com

Verity Inc.
894 Ross Drive
Sunnyvale, CA 94089