A Program That Zeros In on Data

Yet another way to publish information with personal computers has been introduced, joining desktop publishing and compact discs.

It is called Folio Views and it comes from a start-up Utah company, Folio Corp., that has managed to forge some impressive business alliances. The product is a type of software for IBM and compatible PCs that allows users to publish and scan a special kind of database called a full-text retrieval system.

There are basically three categories of database programs. The traditional category, the type people most commonly think of as databases, organizes data into fields in which every item in a single field is the same type of information. A mailing list, which might include a “city” field, is a good example. You could use it to get the name of everyone listed in your database who lives in, say, Chicago.

But there are two other types of databases that consist of paragraphs or pages of text rather than fields of data. With the simpler of these two types, the creator of the text database assigns keywords, or topics, to each paragraph of the indexed text.

For instance, one paragraph might be about oil spills and cleaning up beaches and animals, so it would have the keywords oil, spill, clean, beach and animal. Another paragraph might be about oil tankers and icebergs and would have the keywords oil, tanker and iceberg. If you call up information by a keyword, you would get an entire paragraph or so of information.

Folio Views allows creation of a more sophisticated kind of text database in which every word in every paragraph is indexed so that it can be found in a search. With Folio Views, you can look for a paragraph that, for example, mentions the Exxon Valdez tanker and the word “otter.” As a result, you can often do a better job of zeroing in on the information you need.

There are several programs available that allow large numbers of text files to be searched for any word, but Folio Views has several advantages. To begin with, it is very fast and it stores data in a compressed format, leaving extra room for other information on a hard disk.

In addition, you don’t need a fancy computer, an expensive laser printer or a CD-ROM player to use Folio Views. It will run on any IBM PC or compatible machine, so long as it has at least 512 kilobytes of random access memory. A hard disk is preferred, but not necessary, and it doesn’t matter whether you have graphics or color capability.

Folio Views is designed to create what its publisher calls an “infobase” and to search through those infobases.

An infobase is a collection of text--from a single file or combined from many files--that has been turned by the program into a single, cohesive file in which every meaningful word has been automatically indexed so that it can be found with a search. Thus, there is no need for the creator of an infobase to assign keywords to the text nor for the user of that infobase to try to guess what keywords exist to find needed information.

For instance, I created a test infobase out of 17 of my computer columns. The text in those files totaled about 126,000 characters and the resulting infobase was nearly 156,000 characters. It took Folio Views 3 minutes and 26 seconds to compile and index those columns into a single infobase file. Unfortunately, the instructions for making that happen are poorly written and the process itself is not up to the rest of the program’s ease of use standards. But using another portion of Folio Views, I was then able to search through those columns for any word or combination of words I chose and find the appropriate paragraphs nearly instantly.

The program allows what are known as Boolean searches in which the words “and,” “or” or “not” can be part of the search logic. In other words, you can conduct a search for paragraphs (folios) that contain “oil spill” or “clean-up” but not “Exxon.”

It also allows “proximity” searching in which you specify the maximum number of words that can separate one word or phrase from another word or phrase in a compound search.

Manipulating the text you retrieve is often as important as finding it, and Folio Views includes a simple word processor with a cut-and-paste routine that makes it easy to build a new document around the data that you retrieve from one or more infobases.

There would seem to be an unlimited potential for developing infobases for a broad audience of computer users. According to Folio, some infobases are under development by Mead Data Central, developer of the Lexis and Nexis on-line database services, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Infodata Systems and Prentice Hall.

Folio estimates that as many as a million or more PCs are currently equipped to read infobases built with its software. That is because since last September, a version of Folio’s program has been shipped with the Novell NetWare local area network software, the most popular networking software for IBM and compatible PCs.

The Novell-shipped product, among other things, can read and manipulate information in infobases. The same version of the program is also available directly from Folio as PreViews, with a suggested price of $79.

The more powerful Folio Views program, which allows infobases to be created as well as be read, carries a list price of $495.

A few infobases are already available from Folio, including the King James version of the Bible, $80; Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Rules of Evidence, $50; U.S. Tax code, $295; U.S. Judiciary, Judicial Procedure and Appendix code, $395, and manuals for all WordPerfect products, $30 each.

It is too early to know how the marketplace will respond to Folio Views and PreViews. But the software certainly holds the promise of being an inexpensive way for entrepreneurs to offer large amounts of specialized data to the public. All it would take for an entrepreneur to get started would be a copy of Folio Views, a body of text files and a pile of blank disks.

Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.

THE PRODUCT

Folio Views

Folio Views is a full-text data retrieval system. Suggested retail price: $495.

Features

Creates indexed, full-text retrieval “infobases.” Allows complex compound searches of multiple infobases. Up to 10 windows can be used at once. Word processor can create new document from retrieved data. (The publisher also sells PreViews, which reads infobases but cannot create them, at a list price of $79.)

Requirements

IBM PC or compatible with DOS 2.0 or greater and at least 512K of RAM. Hard disk preferred.

Publisher

Folio Corp., 2155 North Freedom Blvd., Suite 200, Provo, Utah 84604. (801) 375-3700 or (800) 873-3654.