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Overview
eBridge is a platform for publishing electronic
databases with an extremely powerful information retrieval engine that is
capable of managing very large full text, structured data, and hypertext.
It is an industrial strength platform that combines natural language and
Boolean queries with the document relevance ranking.
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Base FeatureseBridge provides sophisticated search functions and
many other features which reveal information or relationships that
otherwise might go undiscovered. These features include:
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 Natural
Language and Boolean Searching
Searchers can enter queries in plain language, describing
desired information in the same terms they would use when
speaking naturally. In addition, eBridge provides an extensive, user-friendly language of
query operators. For users who wish to conduct narrowly focused, logically
precise searches, Boolean operations are fully supported.
Relevance
Ranking Relevance ranking relieves users of
constructing complex query syntax. Retrieved documents are
automatically ordered by degree of likely relevance to the
searcher's query. Because users are exposed
first to records that most closely satisfy their
queries, the need to minimize the number of retrieved
records is eliminated. Freed of the burden of having to formulate
tightly-focused, exclusive search strategies, users can find vital
information more quickly and with less effort.
Field-Restricted Searching
Users can formulate a query
that considers only a field or range of fields
within each record. Moreover, the user can search particular fields for
terms that match a specified alphanumeric value or
fall within a specified range of values.
Word
Stemming eBridge automatically strips query terms of
common suffixes that indicate plurality, verb tense, etc. and
searches for variants of the
resulting root words. This compensates for the variety
and imprecision of language used in queries, and allows
eBridge to retrieve desirable information that would be excluded by a
strict query interpretation. Automatic stemming can be disabled
globally or for individual databases or queries.
Cross Database
Searching
eBridge can search
multiple databases simultaneously. Moreover, it normalizes and
merges the relevance ranking scores, so the
most relevant documents from all open databases appear
at the top of a single hit list. Users
can search across multiple databases with a single query, and administrators
have more flexibility in constructing data collections that
may exceed a platform's file size limitations
Custom
Thesaurus Support
While most eBridge customers prefer
the performance of its dynamic term expansion and
concept searching features to the static nature and administrative
demands of using thesauri, there are circumstances that warrant the use
of a specially developed thesaurus. For this reason,
eBridge supports the addition of custom thesauri.
Multilingual
Support
Because global markets mean a multilingual
customer base, eBridge provides facilities for handling a
wide variety of languages and character sets.
Multi-format
Support
eBridge
supports ASCII, HTML, Adobe Acrobat, news/mail, etc.
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