Relatively new and unknown company, Occam Research Corp based in Watertown, Massachusetts has come up with natural-language-driven data analysis software called Muse which has turned heads at MacWorld. The company and the product are both the brainchildren of George Potts. Potts’ chief claim to fame is that he wrote First Financial Language when he was at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Two years ago he set up Occam Research to write a product that he had been working on for 20 years. The name Occam was chosen because Occam was the name of the first Red Indian student at Dartmouth College and because of Occam’s Razor – the dictum created by mediaeval philosopher Sir William of Occam which states that things must be kept simple – the same William of Occam that inspired Iann Barron to call the assembly language for the Transputer Occam. Following this dictum, Potts believes that people should work with their own language and not be forced to learn computer-speak. Occam’s Robert Roeper claims that Muse converts raw data into finished analysis faster than any other program in the industry and enables users to access its power through everyday English. The user simply asks Muse a question in English through keyboard or other input device. If a simple one-line response is all that is required that is what will come back – if, however, you require the answer to a multi-dimensional question such as who are my top 10 customers for the past three years in the European division and what were their total sales ranked by value share? then Muse would look in the relevant data books and would come back with the answers in a workbook. The user would simply add a column for percentages by clicking the mouse – click the mouse again and a fully-labelled chart appears on the screen. According to Roeper, Muse’s strength lies in its natural language core, which boasts an advanced data dictionary that expands to reflect the individual user’s way of thinking and working. The product’s relational database manager imports data in a variety of forms and familiar formats, from simple text to mainframe databases. Muse can run on any Macintosh of the SE level or higher with 2Mb of RAM, a hard disk and System Version 6.0.5 or higher of the operating system. It supports most standard file formats, including flat files, ASCII, DBF, WKS, WK1, WK3, SYLK and DIF. Occam intends to write versions of the product for other environments. High on the development list is Muse for Windows 3.0, while the Unix community spotting another way to develop an interface to the Unix operating system that does not frighten non-programmers, is keen for a Unix version. The first shipment of Muse to key developers and large user sites is scheduled for October, with general distribution targeted for the first quarter of 1991. A single copy costs $700.
