Verity Inc, the Mountain View, California company which reckons that it has come up with a new approach to storing and retrieving documents in a database (CI No 949), formally announced its Topic system this week.Designed to offer greater levels of accuracy and speed in document searches than current offerings, Topic enables users to customise searches by ranking documents in order of importance, providing access to the most relevant and valuable information first. People need a system that will cut through the noise and target the information that is most important to them, is the pitch from Michael Pliner, president of Verity. Where conventional retrieval programs require users to string search terms together in a linear fashion, Topic is claimed to improve the search process by using outlines to represent search requests, so that users can see all the components of a search and how they relate. It can be used in environments where text files exist in multiple formats on multiple computers, enabling them to be retrieved in their native formats. It comes in two configurations: one for a networked environment, the other for a multi-user environment. On a network, it consists of server software at $15,000, and software for each station – $695 per MS DOS computer, $2,500 for a Sun Microsystems bit-mapped workstation. The multiuser software licence is $39,500 no matter the number of users.
