A start up company in Mountain Veiw, California by the name of Verity Inc is working on a full text document retrieval system that promises to be a real breakthrough once it gets to market. The start-up is a spin-off of nine-year-old Advanced Decision Systems, a US government contract house specialising in artificial intelligence research and development for the intelligence community. Verity was formed to commercialise some of the information management tools ADS has been working on for the spooks. Its first product is Topic, a piece of software that aims to address the problem posed by the usual Boolean-based text retrieval systems: that you get back far more than you ever asked for. Using an object-oriented query language, Topic is claimed to compute the degree of relevence of every document in the database to the question asked and to present the documents that answer the qestion posed according to their relative scores. The company is also after speed. It says it can sort a database of 10 thousand and answer a complicated query in just a few seconds – and offer the same performance on read-only compact disks. The system will allow importing – from ASCII files, OCR readers, relational databases, even wire services – as well as copying, editing and annotating retrieved documents. It will also alert the user to new documents just added to the database that are relevent to his query. Topic will run in single-user or networked environments under Unix, MS-DOS, OS/2 and VAX/VMS. Support for Presentation Manager, X Window and the Mac are planned.
