Metamorph Query Language Highlights

Metamorph allows you to search for intersections of sets of lexical items, while also performing prefix and suffix morpheme processing. Once your target is found the question arises: what rules govern proximity of the items you wish to find? In traditional searching tools, this has been done only on a line by line basis, or by using some quantitative proximity range. Metamorph can search by an intelligent textual unit, a sentence. Whether searching by paragraph, page, chart entry, or memo, in all respects it is intended that the user may define real qualitative units of communication inside of which the concepts he is interested in connecting are located.

The user can specify right within his or her query the delimiters of choice: i.e., he can look within a sentence, paragraph, a proximity of 500 characters, or a specially defined textual unit such as a memo. To the degree that lexical items can be defined and located as beginning and end delimiters, your intersections will be located within those parameters.

REX, Metamorph's Regular EXpression pattern matcher, can be used outside Texis as a special text processing tool. REX can locate uniquely repeated patterns in files, such as headers, footers, captions, diagram references, and so on. If the existing patterns aren't adequate to your needs, you can put them into your files rather easily. For example, using REX's incrementing counter and its search and replace facility, one could locate paragraph starts and number them. Such pattern identification can be made use of by other applications.

Metamorph allows for editing word sets, by hand or using the Backref program. This means that you may select which associations you would like in connection to any search; you can create your own concept sets permanently for future use. You can fine tune the search to use associations of only a certain part of speech. You can enter all known spelling variations of any particular search word in the same way. You can generally customize the program to include your own nomenclature and vocabulary, making it increasingly intelligent the longer it is in use.

You can call up the ApproXimate Pattern Matcher (XPM) and tell it to look for a certain percentage of proximity to an entered string, finding misspelled names and typos. You can also look for numeric quantities entered as text with the Numeric Pattern Matcher (NPM), finding "four score and seven years ago" in the Gettysburg address when searching for events 80 to 100 years ago.

The Metamorph Query Language was designed so that the text searcher can get rudimentary satisfaction of result right away without needing to know much of anything. At the same time, a more complex query can be written with just a little self-training time on the advanced search syntax possibilities. We like to say that there's nothing that can't be found with a Metamorph query. This flexibility enhancing Texis, means the system designer setting up the search environment and wanting to customize it to certain applications can accomplish all his goals.

Texis, with Metamorph inside it, is intended to be a modular set of tools to attack the formidable problem of how to get at and deal with large quantities of information, when you don't really know what you want to know or where to find it; and in the most dynamic, efficient, and pragmatic way possible. It is intended for discrete analysis where the human supplies the final cognition.