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FindSame and other text matching tools



As a follow up to the question I posed about computer-assisted appraisal recently...

One of the technical approaches I explored in my presentation at the Midwest Archives Conference
http://home.earthlink.net/~calalee/present/mac2000/index.htm
was pattern matching.

Digital Integrity, a company that specializes in such tools recently put up FindSame
http://www.findsame.com/

"FindSame is an entirely new kind of search engine that looks for content, not keywords. You submit an
entire document, and FindSame returns a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document
longer than about one line of text."  You can enter a URL, paste some text into a query box or upload
an entire file. FindSame will then show you all the pages on the Web it has indexed that contain some
piece of the text.

You can read more about the other products offered by Digital Integrity at
http://www.digital-integrity.com/products/

There are a number of other companies that have developed popular products based on such pattern/text
matching, such as:

Autonomy
http://www.autonomy.com/

Excalibur - Semantic Network and Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing (APRP)
http://www.excalib.com/
(Rick Barry reminded me that they've been working with Tower Software to build this into TRIM.)

Apple - first V-Twin, then Apple Information Access Toolkit (AIAT)
I haven't used it, but I think (?) their "find by content" feature, originally built into the Finder a
few years ago, is still supported in the latest version of Sherlock
http://www.apple.com/sherlock/

A similar feature is the "more like this" links that you can see on a number of major commercial
search services.  If you find a page you like, you can ask the serch sevice to find you similar ones
that you might also like.

FindSame provides a convenient, free example of how some of these tools work.

As I stated in my presentation, I think they have great promise for supporting the appraisal of
electronic records.

=======================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan
 School of Information
 Phone: 734-647-0505
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
 "Those who forget the past are condemned to reload it."
                        - Nick Montfort, July 2000

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