AskSam - is this my best choice

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4993

Posted by graham.smith
2006-01-12 18:44:30

OK, here we go again. I am summarising 12 years+ worth of technical reports, which are increasing by the month, and likely to continue increasing for another 10 years.

Almost all of them are in Word, but some are PDFs. At the moment I probably have only about 30 rports, but some are rather large, and a search using DTsearch several years ago told me that I had over one million words, when I had far fewer reports to work with.

What I need to be able to do is to find and extract all the information related to a specific site, or animal species, and be confident I haven’t missed any relevant comments.

There are also lots of tables and figures so that Orbis is out, which is a pity because Orbis can extract search in paragraph junks, which makes it useful.

As regards simply searching, then DtSearch works well, but I need something that combines good searching and browsing. I used to be an Asksam user, but found importing documents simply took up too much time. However, for this specific project I wouldn’t mind importing all the reports into Asksam so that I could search, browse and manage the contents. In fact it seems an ideal task for AskSam.

However, can anyone suggest something else I should be looking at.

Thanks,

Graham

Back to archived message list