A practical implementation of Venn-based concept searching

On Marcel's recommendation I have tried out Aduna's Autofocus Personal (Aduna AutoFocus Personal 2003.4.3 - see http://aduna.biz) on the 7500+ document files I have in my work area. These are mainly .doc, .pdf, .ppt and .txt - and many of them a megabyte or more in size. Autofocus took the better part of an hour to index them. What follows is a purely personal opinion based on a few hours play with the system after creating the index. I have no connections with the software developer whatsoever.

Although pricey for personal use (beyond my budget at the moment), Autofocus would be a brilliantly practical personal knowledge management tool to assist my academic writing. Where possible I am downloading all the source documents for a major review I am writing (80-90% of all the references are now available in electronic form, either free-to-the-web or via university library subscriptions). The review topic combines material from several more-or-less unrelated disciplines and I will have to scan many hundreds of source documents to be sure that I have adequately surveyed the existing literature. Autofocus identifies in seconds those documents combining critical terms. The results set includes hyperlinks to the documents in question, such that a single click opens the selected document in the authoring application, where I can then search electronically for the critical term. In secon
 ds or minutes I can identify just those bits of text that are relevant to my immediate need.

The way in which Aduna has implemented the Venn concept is nothing short of brilliant. Previous discussions in this forum remarked on the practical limitation of the classical Venn diagrams to three facets before they became unintelligible. Aduna's visualisation copes clearly and unambiguous with n-dimensions, and gives you genuine point and click navigation through the various circles, their overlaps, and the specific documents included.

My only complaint (and in some systems this would undoubtedly be an advantage!) about the way in which they have implemented the system is that Autofocus's hit list window lists document titles as inferred from the document itself rather than by the network filename. For our company .ppt presentations (which I have a lot of), essentially all have the same inferred name because the division name is used as a standard slide header. On the other hand, essentially all of my filenames are intelligent, so the hitlist would be much more informative to me if I had the option to display the filename. (Note, the file type/format is displayed below the title line.) On the other hand, I only have to click on the title to open the document to see what it actually is. The inferred titles would be invaluable for "secretarial" filing systems where filenames may only be date-sequence numbers or other uni
 que identifiers.

Nevertheless, Aduna's Autofocus has to be one of the potentially most useful tools for personal knowledge management that I have had the pleasure to try out.

Regards,

Bill Hall

Documentation Systems Analyst
Head Office, Engineering
Tenix Defence
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Phone: 03 9244 4820
Email:[email protected]
URL: http://www.tenix.com

Honorary Research Fellow
Knowledge Management Lab
School of Information Management & Systems
Monash University
Caulfield East, Vic. 3145
URL: http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/km/
 


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