Dolphin Intelligence Used to Trawl Networks

Staff -- graphic arts online, 12/1/2000

Based on pioneering re-search into how dolphin brains' use bio-sonar capabilities to recognize fish hiding in sand, KnowledgeBox, from DolphinSearch, Inc. (www.dolphinsearch.com), is a new network information retrieval appliance capable of finding unstructured text documents on a firm's local area network, intranet, or extranet.

In essence, breakthroughs in using pattern recognition techniques enable computers to recognize the meaning of human language when words and phrases have more than one meaning.

"With the huge proliferation of documents on corporate networks, it is no longer sufficient to search for documents using keywords, metatags, or corporate directories," says Andy Kraftsow, chief executive of the year-old Ventura, Calif.-based firm, who set out to redesign a traditional Web search engine to take context and perspective into account when looking for documents.

Kraftsow adds, "True content search is often the only way to quickly locate a specific document in an environment crowded with many similar-seeming documents."

KnowledgeBox, which is called easy to install and requires no library maintenance, reportedly has a reading speed in excess of 10,000 documents per hour, according to the firm. It is said to support all security protocols for documents stored in corporate databases.