On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:21:07 -0400, Phil Dunlap wrote:
>Copernic? Alta Vista 'search my computer'? Sherlock?
Right:
Jonathan Kay wrote about the Mac OS8.5 (donno where he got 8.5 from, I
am not aware that it is released yet) that has something called
'Sherlock' that indexes and then does searches of local and remote
resources.
Copernic (http://www.copernic.com/) is an offline search agent for the
Web, email archives and usenet. You build up a search offline and
Copernic goes off to search multiple engines, comes back with a highly
structured document. It can also search the local disk for key words
and fuzzy phrases. It comes in 2 version, one is free, the other not.
The free version is superb, god knows what the not is like if that is
the quality of the freebie!
AltaVista (Digital, now Compaq + Tandem) have a 'search my computer'
program called 'AltaVista Personal' (download free from AltaVista, just
follow your nose). AV Personal indexes your entire local disk. As
Chris Salter said, you can set up automated schedules, that way, only
the initial indexing takes a long time.
AV Personal will keep a database of all the words in documents, web
pages, even Netscape cache. It has 'query dispatcher', a browser' and
an 'indexer'.
It can also search the Web and usenet as well as your local email
archives. The interface has all the familiar AltaVista facilities and
refinements.
This is all stuff that is going in the right direction. One will need
to combine 'intelligent' searching paradigms with 'quality assesment
tools' such as those being developed by the Summit Working Group led by
HITI in Virginia ( http://hitiweb.mitretek.org/iq) and to couple that
with some sort of an e-WOM (word of mouth collaborative filtering) plus
MedPICS (for info on PICS, go to: http://www.w3c.org).
In short, what I amlooking for is this:
1. Intelligent search agents +
2. Structured tools for different user groups
3. e-WOMs
4. MedPICS (http://www.derma.med.uni-erlangen.de/medpics/)
What you get when you do that is the nearest thing to assured quality
of online information (IQON (tm): Information Quality ONline).
Midge had other designs on it. More to do with Gerard's 'document
paradigm'. I guess that Midge still wants to author the EMR in
something like Word or HTML, index the whole lot and then be able to do
quick 'search and locate' on a distributed database.
I'll leave further explanation of this and the 'document paradigm' to
their respective proponents. Both of whom I regard highly and agree
with the way their minds work.
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>BTW, Ahmad, how did it go in D.C.?
More on that in a separate post.
Ahmad
________________________________________
Dr Ahmad Risk
http://mednetics.org
Office: +44 (1273) 748198
Home: +44 (1273) 724866
Fax: +44 (1273) 748198
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