Mountain View, California-based Verity Inc has announced Topic version 3.0, a new release of its intelligent document retrieval system: it expands the Topic network computing model to support wide area networks and includes new developer products for integration with SQL databases and other applications; also, Topic 3.0 has a redesigned user interface that is claimed to support major graphical user interfaces; Topic and Topic Realtime use concept retrieval, a knowledge-based approach to accessing structured and unstructured data from both internal and external sources; an optional new feature of Topic 3.0 is the Partition Server which expands the current distributed system architecture for local area networks of to include enterprise-wide configurations supporting wide area networks; for database administrators, systems integrators and consultants, Verity has developed a command interpreter and query language called Topiql which enables other applications to perform queries as an integrated part of the application, without the need to write C code; the SQL-Gateway is phase two of Verity’s SQL-Bridge strategy to connect to relational database management systems, and it will be available initially for Oracle on Unix systems; available June 1, Topic database servers cost between $15,600 and $150,000, and desktop retrieval clients are around $800.
