Software development

Our company, being a software development firm, develops software products for its customers in the following languages:

• C++,
• Java,
• Perl,
• Visual Basic
• Awk,
• SED.

Beyond our standard developing skills, we have special knowledge in the following fields:

• engines for search, retrieval and presentation: search engines, search/retrieval,
• content development: content analysis, document keywording and clustering,
• data development: error checking and removal, document enhancement, both format and content,
• topic maps.

1. Search, retrieval and presentation

Arcanum Development has developed the following type of search engines:

• write once, read many indexes for CD applications
• write many, read many indexes for database applications
• full-text, Boolean indexers with proximity and hierarchical search capabilities—i.e. searching embedded structures
• indexes in more languages, with self-developed collating sequences—allowing e.g. typing in Latin characters while searching in Russian data,
• simple natural language client-server search engine for Internet use.

The following retrieval engines were developed:

• bibliographic retrieval engine—single record type, structured records, multiple constructed indexes
• hierarchical full-text engine—optimal for taxonomies or strongly structured texts, such as legal texts
• combinations—static part in full-text engine, updates in bibliographic engine.

The following engines were used:

• SQL engines—MySQL, jdbc, odbc, Microsoft SQL—with embedded HTML text,
• Folio / ActivePublish,
• Adobe Acrobat,
• HTML/CSS/XML/XSLT.

2. Content development

Content of an enterprise or organization can be enhanced in two ways:

• new content is extracted from the data or added to the data,
• presentation of the data is enhanced.

The development of content is preceded with consultation work, which covers the analysis of existing content, its presentation and use. The target of content development is adding convenience content and restructuring the use and presentation of information.

We have developed and used the following tools to discover and enhance the information infrastructure and flow within an enterprise or organization:

• Glossarian: a glossary term recognizer,
• Topic Map: used as a rapid prototyping tool of information structures,
• Intelligent Walker: a glossary-based robot for finding relevant pages and classifying documents.
• identifier recognizer and hyperlinker: adds anchors and hyperlinks based on patterns,
• XML converter: Word to XML converter with hierarchy recognizer.

3. Data development

Enterprises and organizations have backlog data which goes back to many years, maybe in forgotten document and data formats, and possibly on data carriers that they do not have anymore.

IT enterprises often suffer from their customers having buggy and inconsistent data; these companies usually lack the experience or resources to repair, convert, or enhance the databases of their customers.

First of all, we convert these data to readable raw data. Secondly, we provide either a single step or an incremental enhancement of databases or documents, depending on our customers circumstances.

Our experience has shown that an optimal ratio of manual work and software development must be found to minimize the costs of data development.

After successful data checking and enhancement, in accordance with the quality management efforts, the users will be trained, their typical errors will be shown. These training session will lead to less erroneous data.

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4. Topic Maps

Our company tracks the development of Topic Map standards since the first approval of the SGML standard in 1999. Currently we have developed an internal use application for information structure and information flow prototyping based on the XTM standard.

We believe in the use and future of topic maps and we will further enhance our technology to cover topic map based searching, classification and to further support our consultancy work.

Currently—June 2001—we are working on the Topic Map presentation of the International Property Classification, - which is one of the world's biggest knowledge bases - and the other Classifications.