The London-based UK arm of document retrieval specialist BRS Software Products Inc – a division of InfoPro Technologies Inc, McLean, Virginia – has introduced BRS/Search 6.1, an enhanced version of its document retrieval system for client-server Unix environments. The software, which was first introduced as long as 12 years ago for mainframe environments, is designed to enable multiple users to search and retrieve specific documents, on the basis of their content, rather than on indexed component labels. BRS/Search can handle large volumes of unstructured textual information by recording the position of every word. In comparison, traditional document management systems developed on top of relational database management systems rely on a pre-defined indexing system, which sub-divides a document by title and paragraph, not on its content as such. This restricts text retrieval, BRS says. The client-server version of BRS/Search can store text, images, graphics, audio and video documents. It comes with BRS/Word, a WordPerfect filter that imports and exports WordPerfect 5.1 documents to and from BRS/Search. It includes Ally, a document analysis module that details statistics on word occurences. The BRS/Thesaurus is a library of heirarchical word lists. The system also includes BRS/Demon, a data entry editor; BRS/Native Mode, graphical toolkit for command level user interfaces; and BRS/Views, a character-based interface toolkit. BRS/Search also includes BRS/Vision, a Windows-style interface. It provides object-linking and graphical displays of heirarchial structures like the thesarus and tool boxes. BRS is currently developing Win32 application programming interface extensions for Windows NT which will be available by the end of the year. BRS users are predominantly found in the legal, government, security and publishing sectors. The system can search up to 16 databases simultaneously and works with a variety of relational database systems, including Oracle, Informix, Ingres and Sybase. Available now, the system is priced from UKP2,000, depending on the number of users and system. The company, which has four US and four European offices, has branched out further and has now established an Asia-Pacific operation for which it chose Singapore.
