Gants Hill, Essex-based Ymijs Ltd is heralding its R/KYV – say it archive – product as one step beyond the document image processing system. Ymijs Ltd is a new company which was set up in April 1990 as a subsidiary of data processing and accounting systems designer Software Holdings Plc – also based in Gants Hill – to market the new R/KYV system, which was launched in July this year. Software Holdings says it began to move towards image processing as a response to customer demand, particularly from accountants, for a processing system that could scan invoice data, for example, and condense it into only that information that is actually needed. After working on the development of such a product for two to three years, Software Holdings has come up with R/KYV. The new system offers a unique integration of optical character recognition and document imaging, giving more flexible indexing and retrieval capabilities. It scans in text as usual, but runs a newly developed optical character recognition system over it to produce an index such that any word in the document will enable quick access to it – even if the word is entered incorrectly: the index will use fuzzy matching to recognise phonetic spellings too, so it wouldn’t matter for example that the Mail on Sunday misspelt Ymijs’ name in its article on the company last Sunday. But Ymijs – Images – says the really revolutionary thing about its product is that it can pull off data directly from the data processing system to produce on the R/KYV system an exact copy of the text being printed, yet extracting for storage only the data that is required. This could in some cases mean a data storage compression of 1Mb into 20Kb. For large organisations, for example, which constantly receive repeat invoices from the electricity board, paper suppliers and so on, the R/KYV system can identify company logos on invoices it has scanned before which incites it to store only the information it has been told to look for – such as the date, company name, items invoiced for and the amount. R/KYV is available now in the UK and is hoped to be available in a few months in the US and in mainland Europe. At the moment R/KYV is being sold mainly direct, but distribution will eventually be through third party dealers. Typical price for a stand-alone system, including hardware, that stores 35,000 images, is around UKP43,000. – Susan Norris