Structuring, Organizing and Annotating Unstructured Data
Not only does ZyLAB offer several full-text retrieval techniques for paper, and over 250 different electronic file formats, more importantly, ZyLAB recognizes the fact that full-text retrieval on its own will not always do the job. Therefore, ZyLAB offers several techniques to organize and structure unstructured document sets, as you go, by using powerful full-text techniques. As a result, one can organize and reorganize documents at any time. This minimizes the need for organization and coding prior to scanning. As you work with your information, you can structure it in the most useful, meaningful way and build your own table of contents. This is especially important if you are involved in building new concepts and ideas, or if different people within your organization plan to use the same information for different applications. You can also enhance the navigational capabilities of your documents by adding key fields, bookmarks, annotations and page thumbnails, so inexperienced users can access the data just as easily as experienced searchers. Table of Contents An important point, which is often overlooked, is that it is highly improbable that a "magic" query will deliver all relevant documents without any off-topic references. Searching an unstructured database is an interactive process requiring a number of different techniques whereby the number of documents relevant to the query is constantly narrowed down. The quality of so called full-text queries techniques is often disappointing. They produce a very large amount of documents and require a sophisticated filtering operation to remove the non-relevant references. Often managers do not have the time to engage in this kind of interactive process and delegate this task to others. Eventually these people have to report back to management with an easily digestible result of their search. Their task could be facilitated enormously if there were a system available to drag the relevant documents into a special folder, which would be indexed automatically and could be presented to management as is. Therefore, ZyIMAGE offers you full-text retrieval techniques to use to find all documents that refer to a certain subject and provide these documents with a label (a keyfield) or organize the documents in a hierarchical structure or add searchable bookmarks to the documents. The Contents section is represented in a tree structure (a tree of contents). You can select files from the results lists and drag and drop selected file references into the content tree. You can also create your own tree structure (similar to the e-mail Exchange client). When you want to edit a table of contents, be sure to lock the table of contents first in order to prevent network writing violations. With a table of contents one can organize documents in a hierarchical structure. Once such a structure has been created, a document can be opened by double clicking the reference in the table of contents. Several tools are provided to organize the hierarchy, to print (parts of the) table of contents and to search only selected branches from the document collection. Bookmarks Searchable Bookmarks, which are user definable notes attached within pages of a document, enable a more precise level of document organization, compared to the Table of Contents, which operates at the document level. The notes are stored in a FoxPro type database table, enabling full structured database capabilities for linking related pages within a document, filtering and producing customized reports. This feature is especially important for law firms or any application where multiple users are collaborating on a single project. These bookmarks can be labeled with several types (user definable), dates and searchable free text. Bookmarks can be organized in a hierarchical structure and simple reports can be generated. A local (personal) bookmark database, as well as network based public bookmark files can be used. See the documentation for more information on this new feature. To create folders in the Bookmark is simple, just select the icon Bookmarks with your mouse and right click. You will see the options to 'insert folder' or 'delete folder', select 'insert folder'. There is no limit to the number of folders you can have in Bookmarks. Adding your favorites to Bookmarks: Again this is made simple in ZyIMAGE. Locate your favorite documents by searching with ZyFIND. Open the document and view in ZyVIEW, while in ZyVIEW, right click the mouse anywhere in the text. An option will be available to 'Drop Bookmark', enter here and a new screen 'Add Bookmark' screen, is displayed. From the Add Bookmark screen you will have the option to have the document added to the Bookmark itself or to a Bookmark folder. To place in a folder you already created select, 'Create in>>'. Highlight the folder or else select New Folder from this screen. Edit Bookmark: If you have made any errors or wish to update the Bookmark then select Edit. There is also a list of different types of bookmarks, which you can change too, select the most appropriate type for your favorites. You can also print reports on bookmarks, change the standard bookmark types, search bookmarks and organize your existing bookmarks. Bookmarks are user-based. You can share them on the network by placing the files in the ZyBOOKMARK directory on a file server and access them from another ZyFIND installation. Fields Fields are physically defined areas of text files. You can limit a search to such an area. ZyIMAGE retrieves a file only if it contains a search term within the area defined as the field. To choose a Field for use in a search statement, select on of the definitions and click on it to add it to the text in the search statement text box. The Field name appears in the text box, followed by a pair of braces, with the cursor between them. This means that the program is waiting for you to type the search term to find the section of the source file marked by the Field delimiters. ZyIMAGE can offer you several types of keyfields such as: plain text, date, numerator (counters), lists, bar-codes, and several fields that will be filled automatic with document properties such as date, time, language, number of pages, etc. You can easily combine field and full-text searches. Fields and document labels can be changed or added by batch and individually. All added information will be fully searchable. |
