BRS/Search

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BRS/Search became LiveLink Discovery Server and is currently owned by Open Text. It was also owned by Dataware Technologies.

The history of BRS/Search includes its origins in the Oxford English Dictionary project that included Tim Bray, one of Open Text's founders. BRS/Search was also used briefly at Yahoo.

BRS/Search installations found include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, AMGEN, references to MedLine, a University in Georgia and USC. The public can search USPTO publications with BRS/Search on the internet. And, BRS/Search is behind the search performed by patent examiners and public patent searchers at the USPTO.

The core BRS/Search technology in the Open Text portfolio was augmented with other capabilities through various acquisitions. For example, Dataware's acquisition of Soveriegn-Hill brought InQuery, “a probabilistic information retrieval system using an inference network” , which was developed by the University of Massuchusetts Amherst Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval out of the UMass CIIR and into the marketplace. A product re-branding table shows the range of products, their old names and their new names.

InQuery is a concept search engine that uses noun phrases, parts of speech and other co-occurence relationships in overlapping passages of text rather than single term inverted indexes of single words in documents.

Open Text's portfolio has grown to include Hummingbird Content Management and has always included BASIS

Contents 1 2007 2 2006 3 2003 4 2002 5 1999 6 1997 7 1996 8 1992-1995 9 1991 10 1987

[edit] 2007

OpenText listed the following key features for LiveLink Discovery Server on March 26, 2007.

• Provide simultaneous information access
• Support native document formats
• Leverage searching and filtering tools
• Automatically rank documents by relevance
• Track usage
• Access control management facilities
• Create dynamic embedded links in documents
• Protect documents with locking and auditing capabilities
• Search alerts

[edit] 2006

Open Text

   * Celebrates 15th anniversary.
   * Named as Microsoft's global ECM solutions partner and Global ISV Partner of the Year.
   * Acquires Hummingbird Ltd.
   * Earns the highest possible rating ('strong positive") in Gartner's MarketScope for Records Management.
   * Recognized by Forrester Research for Business-Content-Centric Application Leadership.
   * Open Text is the market leader in ECM globally, according to Gartner.
   * Customers include World Anti-Doping Agency, Husky Energy, Kichler Lighting, FremantleMedia, and National Collegiate Athletic Association.

[edit] 2003

BRS/Search North America User's Group (BRSNAUG) website with a Jun 08 2003 date listed the following features for BRS/Search. The BRSNAUG also disincorporated in 2003. Cross-references to BRS/Search on the WWW point to Open Text Livelink.

BRS/Search is a full-text database and information retrieval system. BRS uses a fully-inverted indexing system to store, locate, and retrieve unstructured or "soft" data.

Engine features include:

• Rapid query response time.
• Numerical data handling and elementary statistical processing (sum, avg, min, max)
• Search results weighting and relevancy ranking
• Left- and right-truncation and expansion of search terms
• Superior data compression -- loaded databases typically use only about 1.5 times the input stream size in disk space
• Large capacity databases - up to 100 million documents, each with up to 65,000 paragraphs
• Fine control of indexing and searching -- right down to the word, sentence, and paragraph level
• Fine control over data security. Document access can be controlled at the database, document, and paragraph level
• International language support for all 7/8 bit characters sets and customizable language tables
• Flexible and customizable stop word lists
• ANSI-compatible thesauri
• Hypertext links within and between documents and databases (R6.x)
• Support for natural language parsing of queries
• Automatic document summarization tools
• Client/Server development
• Programming interfaces for World-Wide Web (HTTP, HTML) access to databases

[edit] 2002

An OpenText news article from 2002-06-04 states:

The BRS Product Group of Open Text will introduce the BRS Advanced Information Retrieval Tool Kit. As document collections continue to expand, searchers require tools beyond a typical ranked list of documents in response to a search query. To meet this need, Open Text is providing a set of advanced information retrieval and analysis tools to enhance the capabilities of BRS/Search applications. The tool kit consists of three modules: The Clustering Tool, The Query by Example and The Concept Mining/Enhanced Search Tool. Dave Schubmehl, Open Text Vice President of BRS Products explains, "these tools aide the information professional's expanded role—to analyze and synthesize search results for end-users. In particular, the Concept Mining Tool analyzes the text in retrieved documents, extracts the names of companies, people, and/or the phrases or words, and presents a list of the most significant concepts in each requested category. Each concept is accompanied by a weight that indicates its relative importance in the analyzed text."

The Open Text display will also feature Query Server, a powerful solution for unifying access to multiple internal and external information sources including repositories, document management systems, intranets, and the Internet. "Today, it is often necessary to search each of these information sources separately causing employees to waste time in attempts to find information instead of putting it to use," says Mr. Schubmehl. Query Server solves this problem by integrating Web-compatible data sources through the power of the Internet. It broadcasts a user's query to multiple search-enabled information sources, merges and sorts the query results, and returns a single ranked list, providing a valuable first step toward a unified knowledge management system for your organization.

[edit] 1999

The BRSNAUG Presentation Abstracts page from the 14th BRS North American Users Group Conference August 25-27, 1999 Desmond Hotel & Conference Center Albany, New York, USA offers further information about the future of BRS/Search, InQuery, QBE, Categorization and Clustering while it was owned by Dataware Technologies.

[edit] 1997

[NetAnswer Extensions] in Air Force Web Flight.

[edit] 1996

Various stateless and stateful, connectionless, daemonless web interfaces to BRS databases begin to appear.

[edit] 1992-1995

[edit] 1991

• Open Text search engine supports SGML, and searches user-defined document structures without loss of performance.
• Open Text incorporates in June 1991; starts shipping product in September.
• Customers include Oxford University Press, the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association, and University libraries.

[edit] 1987

The C language version of BRS Release 4 became available for VM/CMS.