Re: boolean search

[Don Montgomery <donm@methodbydesign.com>]

Francesco,

I checked out asksam.com, and it seems (on the face of it, 
anyway) to be a windows product.  I would describe it, 
from my brief tour of the website, as something like an 
archive manager.  It has some neat features, like 
import/build/export of web pages/directories, import of 
pdfs, word docs, textfiles, etc.  It seems to implement 
wildcard and boolean search over the entire archive, while 
still offering some way to treat some of the data in a 
traditional "fields and records" database mode.

I don't know of an app like that for any of the *nix.

However, I don't think this is an amd64-specific topic.

Don


On Sun, 18 Jun 2006, Francesco Pietra wrote:

> Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:18:49 +0200
> From: Francesco Pietra <frapietra@alice.it>
> To: Don Montgomery <donm@methodbydesign.com>
> Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org, debian_amd64 <debian-amd64@lists.debian.org>
> Subject: Re: boolean search
>
> Hi Don:
> do you know Asksam?  I would like to have something like that, at that speed
> and breath of search.
> Cheers
> francesco
>
> On Sunday 18 June 2006 20:21, Don Montgomery wrote:
> > Francesco,
> >
> > Any text editor will have hotkey search on
> > case-insensitive character strings, which allows you to
> > use a text file to store and find unstructured text data.
> > For ease of use, I especially like the "incremental
> > search" feature in emacs.  A simple textfile, no matter
> > how searchable, may be too free-form for you (and it will
> > not support the embedding of binary objects).  If so, what
> > _is_ on your wish list for such an application?  Are you
> > thinking of a flat file database?  Could you use a
> > spreadsheet?
> >
> > Don
> >
> > On Sun, 18 Jun 2006, Francesco Pietra wrote:
> > > Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 18:01:46 +0200
> > > From: Francesco Pietra <frapietra@alice.it>
> > > To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> > > Cc: debian_amd64 <debian-amd64@lists.debian.org>
> > > Subject: boolean search
> > > Resent-Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 13:02:19 -0500 (CDT)
> > > Resent-From: debian-amd64@lists.debian.org
> > >
> > > What about a boolean search application? I mean to use it as a free-form
> > > personal database, not for internet. Not for a relational database, which
> > > is not what a scientists is aimed at to record scientific literature
> > > abstracts.
> > >
> > > It would be useful if records could accept embedded graphics, although i
> > > do not pretend that a graphical search is made available.
> > >
> > > If such a software is not available for deabian users, why not taking
> > > that as a project? In the hands of an expert programmer, It could simply
> > > start as a boolean search, but, step by step during use, it could be
> > > developed also as a mathematical search (equal to, more than, less than,
> > > etc). Such thing is an indispensable tool for disciplines that are not
> > > purely theoretical but also make recourse to data.
> > >
> > > Dont say, please, ask the science list, because what I am proposing is
> > > much wider than that (which justifies the project; moreover, the science
> > > list is dangerously becoming fractionated for specializations). Boolean
> > > search is extremely useful also in business, legal affairs, etc,  and it
> > > is far less time consuming that maintaining a structured database. Not to
> > > say of the boring maintaining of a structured database. While you
> > > maintain a free-form database you just learn. It is the same as
> > > traditional learning.
> > >
> > > cheers
> > > francesco pietra

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