Specializing Knowledge

You could say that Metamorph's general knowledge approximates that of the man on the street without the benefit of specialized knowledge. This knowledge is stored in a large Thesaurus containing some 250,000 word associations supplied with the program.

It is not necessary for a query item to be stored in the Thesaurus for Metamorph to search for it. In fact, for many technical terms you would want only forms of that exact word rather than any abstract associations.

If you wanted someone to intelligently correlate information from a medical, legal, or other specialized or technical data base, you would expect him to have a working knowledge of the nomenclature used in discussing those subjects. Therefore, we have created a facility for teaching Metamorph specialized vocabulary and domain specific inference sets to draw upon for its concept set expansion.

You are customizing Metamorph for your own use by adding semantic knowledge to the web of equivalences. In this way, the program can be made "smarter" and able to take on the "viewpoints" of the user where required. Metamorph becomes an increasingly powerful retrieval tool through this process of the user teaching it new language and associations.

By passing this ability onto the user, and allowing for thesaurus customization to be an integral part of a search environment, the job of evolving vocabulary becomes entirely the user's responsibility and under his control. We provide a basic foundation of over 250,000 associations which is adequate to process any query with a reasonable amount of discretion and intelligence. The job of refining that vocabulary and keeping it up to date as language evolves is up to you.