Golden retrieval

Convera announces Version 8.1 of its RetrievalWare search software platform. Currently available on a limited basis with general release scheduled in 2005, the new offering is said to be particularly effective for users who want to personalize searches to monitor large volumes of data.

Convera reports new features in RetrievalWare 8.1 include:

Personalized content filtering. To establish highly personalized, “always-on” search queries, a user can utilize the new Content Filter feature of RetrievalWare 8.1. For both commercial and government environments where vast amounts of information enter databases each day, a user can set specific queries to automatically identify certain documents as soon as they enter the database. Keywords selected by the user within the query immediately tag exact details within a document, isolate the document, and then route it to the user’s personal folder.

Alerting. Working in tandem with the personalized content filtering feature, users can create or subscribe to a new alert capability. That capability notifies users that the Content Filter has found a document matching a pre-set query and can optionally push that document to the waiting user’s e-mail application or wireless PDA.

Personalized folder sharing. The core personalization feature of RetrievalWare 8.1 is the option of saving queries within a user’s Personal Folders. For researchers and analysts who perform regular search queries, but want to avoid repeatedly re-entering those queries, RetrievalWare 8.1 saves individual queries and matching results, eliminating the need to search for data that has already been extracted.

Collaboration. RetrievalWare 8.1 was designed for users to share and publish their own personal folders with other users in a public folder hierarchy. In a scientific or research-intensive environment, a researcher or analyst with subject matter expertise can use that feature to share their “Personal Document Collections.”

Future RetrievalWare 8.1 capabilities planned include:

• Web services APIs for .Net application development and the JSR168 WebLogic portlet,

• new industrial and manufacturing taxonomies and the Convera Workbench 3.0, and

• new language detection, encoding detection and conversion, and Unicode compatibility.