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COMBINE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS with visionary entrepreneurs and what do you get? The development of new and exciting ways to retrieve, organize, visualize, and comprehend information graphically and intuitively. Companies are springing up to commercialize the technology, called topic mapping.
One new company creating topic mapping information retrieval is Groxis [www.groxis.com], which has created a program called Grokker. It retrieves and organizes searches in a graphical and contextual way. (The name grokker is from "grok," a word coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition, it means "to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.") Since Grokker's debut in October 2002, it has received much attention from technical editors in the press (New York Times, CNN, Fortune, Business Week). Although still in the final stages of its Preview Release version, it will be widely available in the coming months. As with many software programs, there will be a basic and professional edition. An enterprise-wide version is also planned. At Demo 2003 in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it won best of show and the coveted Demogod award, Groxis unveiled its Preview Release 2.1, which is priced at $99.95.
EVOLUTION OF TOPIC MAPPING
Earlier generations of taxonomy software include those from Semio, now owned by Entrieva [www.entrieva. com], linguistic software that does content indexing and categorization through its SemioTagger and visualization with SemioMap, and Inxight's Star Tree Studio [www.inxight.com]. Both of these companies have gone through change and development, and both are active, particularly in the business environment, in managing/mapping information software for companies. Inxight recently released its Inxight Smart Discovery software that extracts metadata from documents for businesses.
Other "second-generation" software included Mohomine's MohoClassifier (now evolved into Mohomine's Mohoclassifier, partnered in a strategic relationship with WordMap), Cartia's ThemeScape, and Metacode's Metasaurus. Cartia was acquired by Aurigin in 2000. Aurigin was then acquired by Information Holding Inc. in 2002 and merged into IHI's MicroPatent product. Metacode was acquired by Interwoven in 2000, but much of its technology is evident in Grokker.
Ontopia [www.ontopia.com] and Antarctica's VisualNet [http://antarctica. net/] both have some good ideas about the topic mapping potential, but are still developing the right technology to make the software compelling and...