March 27, 1996

Paper and Searchable Images Head for the Web

Innovative document management software unveiled in Chicago.

As corporate intranets proliferate, a sea of paper-based documents and graphics- intensive image archives are on their way to the Web. There are a number of resulting challenges in the imaging arena, including automating the translation of paper-based documents to HTML format, and facilitating searchable images for large image archives. At next week's Association for Information & Image Management International trade show in Chicago, several new products designed to manipulate text and images on the Web are expected to debut. We got an early glimpse of some that are available now.

Iota Technologies (203-227-5602), headquartered in Tel Aviv, will show InterSite, software designed to provide database management of TIFF-compatible SIF (Searchable Image Format) files, in addition to other image formats. SIF files are essentially "on- image," searchable graphics files that allow InterSite's retrieval engine to identify geometric text patterns for retrieval purposes, then automatically HTML-encode the relevant, retrieved information.

Intranet administrators can, for example, capture a thousand text- and graphics-based documents per hour to SIF format and ask InterSite to highlight information relevant to specific search criteria. Then the software will strip out the relevant parts of the original SIF image database, automatically HTML-encode those parts, and transmit them as an organized whole to a client via HTTP. News clippings are a prime example of the kind of text- and graphics-based content that InterSite is designed to make easy to put on the Web.

According to company officials, "the more prevalent solution for the problem now, of course, is to compile separate OCR-generated text files, then apply retrieval and HTML technologies to those files."

Iota, which plans to show a number of similar technologies at AIIM next week, will offer InterSite technology in both a Netscape Plug-In version and a standalone version. Pricing and other details will be announced at the show.

See PC Magazine's Trends Online coverage next week for more innovations from the AIIM show, as well as updates from San Francisco's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.--Sebastian Rupley

Index to previous Trends Online articles.

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company