Vertex Librarian

the advanced Digital Librarian

The Vertex Librarian, from Vertex Software, was an intelligent information manager designed to be an alternative to the Digital Librarian in the NeXTstep environment. The Vertex Librarian offers all of the features and functionality of the Digital Librarian, plus a great deal more. The interface of the Vertex Librarian looks very much like the interface to Digital Librarian. This was done to provide a familiar look and feel to the product, making it useful to you straight out of the box. The Vertex Librarian had been reviewed by a number people and given very high marks.

You would find that the Vertex Librarian had all the functionality and the same look and feel as the Digital Librarian. However, the Vertex Librarian allowed a broad range of search capabilities beyond that of Digital Librarian. It also had a hypertext capability which would allow you to hypertext documents at will. The thesaurus which was packaged with this system could be modified as you wished using the provided utilities. The on-line help was provided as an Information Base and was really the user's manual which had already been put in a hypertext form for easy browsing. The Help Information Base contained a file called tutorial.rtf which was a good place to start to learn how to use the system.

Vertex Librarian was a valuable tool for both users and developers using the NeXTstep environment. It was often cumbersome to navigate the large volume of on-line documentation that came with NeXTstep, even using Digital Librarian. Vertex Librarian provided much more powerful tools for managing this documentation. For example, navigating the Developer's documentation was much easier using hypertext. Hypertext links could be set up between all occurrences of a class name and that class's documentation in a matter of seconds with Vertex Librarian. The conceptual search facilities of Vertex Librarian also made finding specific items of information a snap.

In the Vertex Librarian, collections of documents were called information bases or simply Info Bases. These were similar to the bookshelves in the Digital Librarian. However, info bases were not restricted to textual information. Any type of file could be stored in an Info Base. Info bases could contain documents, graphic images, sound and other items without limit. This allowed you to collect all files associated with a particular topic of interest into one, easy to access, location. You use the familiar drag and drop interface you have become accustomed to in Digital Librarian to add documents to an info base. New documents or directories which were dragged into an info base were immediately indexed and an incremental index was added to the full index of the information base.

The Vertex Librarian provided more sophisticated query capabilities than Digital Librarian. You could still perform simple queries exactly as you do in Digital Librarian. However, you could also perform complex queries using the Vertex Query Language. The feature list below gives you an idea of the many kinds of queries possible with the Vertex Librarian.

Much of the power of the Vertex Librarian came from its use of a thesaurus. A thesaurus was much more than a synonym list. It was a semantic network in that it contained concepts that were related to one another in various ways. The Vertex Librarian was able to use one or more thesauri to do conceptual searches for documents in an Info Base, finding information that was difficult or impossible using simple keyword search (as Digital Librarian does). A thesaurus could also be used for document classification, which could be very useful in processing large amounts of information, such as electronic mail or news feeds.

A standard English language thesaurus was supplied with the Vertex Librarian. You could use this thesaurus as is, extend it, or create your own specialized thesauri. Various utilities were provided in the Vertex Librarian to allow you to import a thesaurus or create one from scratch, and an interactive browser was included with the Vertex Librarian to browse and modify existing thesaurus entries.

The Vertex Librarian also provided hypertext capabilities. You could set up hypertext links between any two documents in an Info Base, establishing an easy way to associate and access related information. The Vertex Librarian also provided search and link services callable from most applications. So, if you were working on a file in an application, you could easily search related files through the Services menu. Remember, because the Vertex Librarian deals with any type of file, this was not limited to word processing applications, but includes most other applications as well.


Features

Information Base and Thesaurus Management
* Creating and removing info bases and thesauri
* Compacting info bases and thesauris
* Owner controlled access to read/write privileges of info bases and thesauri

Full-text Indexing
* Drag and drop interface
* Full text incremental indexing
* Indexing of numbers and dates
* Fast indexing speeds
* Define separate stopword lists for each info base Retrieval
* Full word, prefix and anywhere search, like Digital Librarian.
* Full text search
* Keyword and phrase search
* Wildcards in keywords
* Proximity search (within, nwithin, precedes, nprecedes)
* Numeric search and comparison (>, <, >=, <=)
* Date search and comparison (>, <, >=, <=)
* Boolean combination (AND, OR, ANDNOT, XOR)
* Query nesting ('(, ')')
* Conceptual search
* Find all occurrences of text containing word and it variants
* Query term weighting
* Retrieval results bound to a variable for subsequent use
* Retrieval results sorted by weight, alphabetically, or by date
* Define macros for commonly used or complex queries
* Retrieval viewing capabilities with retrieval results highlighted
* Thesaurus browsing facilities for query construction
* Search Service provided to other applications
* Search for documents similar to selected text

Hypertext
* Hypertext browsing facilities for browsing and create hypertext links
* Drag and drop link generator for easy creation of multiple links
* Link creation could be automated
* Link Service provided to other applications

Thesaurus
* Semantic net-like architecture
* Public Domain thesaurus provided as a base users could expand at will
* User-defined relation types and weights
* could be applied to incoming documents for classification
* could be constructed on-the-fly by users or populated from ANSI-standard Thesaurus Image Format records (available in electronic form) for special thesauri (medical, legal, etc.)
* could be populated by analyzing current documents of interest
* Facilities provided for performing a wide variety of searches on the thesaurus (based on term or phrases, relation types, etc.) and the results of these searches could be directly incorporated into a query
* Thesaurus Search Service provided to other applications

Text classification
* Real-time text classification based on thesaurus
* Uses proprietary techniques to extract important terms and phrases for use in classification
* Wide variety of utilities to aid in the process of database and classification maintenance

Document analysis tools
* Standalone utility
* Analyzes an information base for possible thesaurus term inclusions
* Uses a custom-designed dictionary to aid in finding relevant terms and relationships to add to your thesaurus
* Add new word relation types to a thesaurus
* Generate and update list of relations between all words in the Dictionary
* Interactive utility for accepting/rejecting proposed additions to the thesaurus

NeXT, NeXTstep and Digital Librarian were trademarks of NeXT Computer Inc.

Vertex Software Inc