[Sigia-l] Product for "automated information qualification"?!

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Fri, 6 Sep 2002 Locatelli at aol.com wrote:

> The most important thing to note about this tool is the information at
> the bottom of the home page: "iq-server contains a range of freely
> definable determinants, such as synonyms, antonyms, abbreviations,
> terminology or translations. The client provides the content of these
> thesauri. The iq-server then structures and adapts them to suit
> individual requirements."
>
> Translation: you have to do the hard intellectual work of defining
> parent/child relationships, related terms, and variant terms by
> constructing thesauri. Then we will run it through our various
> algorithms so we can do the fuzzy logic part. The process still requires
> significant intellectual effort from human brains in constructing the
> thesauri.

Supporting user provided thesauri is a good thing IMHO.  So is automation
where appropriate.  If this product does a good job of blending the two,
and particularly if it enables the implementors to make the decisions as
to what's appropriate, then that would be a good deal more than what most
search engines provide.

> It's another example of a tool making great claims and then glossing
> over the need for human input.

While the page is full of marketing drivel, I don't know if you can call
the manual thesaurus stuff glossed over when it's plainly announced as a
feature on the introduction page.

Unfortunately the information in the following pages doesn't really go
much deeper.  This seems to be par for the course with most commercial
software in this area.

Andrew McNaughton