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OCR (3rd Party)

OCR - ISIS
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows for the user to run a search within the entire database or a narrow search within just a profile or other queries. Look for specific words to save endless hours or days researching through thousands of documents, or find a misplaced document within the database.

• More than one way to search. IMS understands that different users want different kinds of search methods. Recognizing this and the importance of offering a flexible desktop search product, IMS: provides you with multiple query methods:
  • Menu-Assisted Query enables the user to quickly build accurate queries with push-button operators.
  • Natural Language Query allows users to quickly search by asking a question in English.
  • Command Based Query uses the IMS Query Syntax, which provides for phrase matching, Boolean and proximity operators and metadata search to create detailed and sophisticated searches that produce results in a single go.
  • The 'Browse Taxonomy' function bases its search logic on conceptual categories that you create in your index. Concepts are structured like a table of contents in a Concept Taxonomy.
  • Web Style Query relies on standard Internet search syntax to enable users to search their documents in the same way they search the Internet.
  • Provides users with the ease of entering a query directly into a taskbar window, thus offering ubiquitous search functionality and saving you a step in your pursuit of information.
  • Gives users the ability to perform 'sounds like' or 'starts with' searches for instances when the spelling of certain terms are not known. Simply type each letter and it gradually refines the list of available terms that potentially match your query.
  • The 'Saved Query List' allows users to save queries and reuse them for automatically or manually running the same search again.
• Search, searched, searches, searching, etc. Find different tense forms of your search terms with stemming. For example, a search for 'read' will find 'reads', 'reader', 'readable', 'readiness', 'readily', etc.
• Fielded searching. Fielded searches within a database are limiting due to their inability to search efficiently for words and phrases as components of fields. Because IMS intimately understands words, it transcends fields and finds search matches where traditional techniques would fail.
• Advanced Operators. IMS doesn't restrict you to the basic AND and OR operators of many search engines. You can specify operators to find words that are:
  • Within a paragraph of each other
  • In the same paragraph
  • Within a certain number of words of each other
  • One word followed by the other
  • In a paragraph with a certain label
  • And more (see the IMS Query Syntax page for more details)

• Intelligent numbers and dates. IMS recognizes numbers and dates in documents regardless of how they are expressed. So you can enter 1/1/02 and receive results that contain "1st Jan 2002", "1 Jan 02", "01/01/2002" and so on.
• Date and number range searching. IMS can search for dates and numbers within a specified range.
• The Intelligent Agent performs searches for you. Tell the Intelligent Agent what kind of information you're looking for, and it will remain on the lookout for new data that matches your query. You are notified the minute information matching your requirements becomes available.
• Multi-lingual support. IMS searches most Asian and European languages, including: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Cyrillic, Russian, Thai, Bahasa, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Arabic. Multi-language indexes are available with Unicode.
• Synonym rings enable you to customize associations between terms, so that your search for a particular term will also find documents containing the synonyms you specified. For example, an investigator could search for a suspect named 'Harold Cartrock' and also find documents that contain the suspect's known aliases, whether they be 'Harry', 'Rocko' or 'Mr. Big'.
• Fuzzy logic is used to automatically adjust for many OCR scanning or typographical errors that occur when you scan in documents for searching.

Results Display This is when you are provided with a list of results related to your query. The IMS interface makes it easy to quickly review the results and pinpoint the information you want.

• Sub-second results. You'll be amazed at how quickly IMS returns the results from your query
• Relevant results. IMS uses an algorithm to determine which results are most relevant to your query, and lists these first.
• 'Did You Mean?' feature. In instances where IMS: finds few or no relevant results for a query, it will call upon its 'Did You Mean?' feature to suggest potential alternatives. Unlike other products, IMS will never suggest an alternative that doesn't exist in a user's index.
• Results grouping/clustering. IMS: enables users to logically group the list of results according to relevance, number of hits, file format, author or one of a variety of other variables. Without the ability to sift and sort results in this manner, users aren't saving as much time as they could be with desktop search.
• Preview pane. To ensure even faster retrieval of information, the desktop search tool now offers a preview pane, thus allowing users to view the contents of a result (with hit highlighting enabled), without having to first launch the document in the IMS browser or its native format.
• Metadata and document information hinting. Hover your cursor over a result and IMS: will display all known metadata and document information in tool tip format.
• Quick View provides a 'snapshot' of each document in your result list. For each document in the list, a context extract of every occurrence of the search terms is displayed. Quick View results lists can also be printed or extracted and saved as a .txt or .csv file.
• Hit highlighting displays each search term with a highlighted background, so you can see exactly where they occur within a document.

See also