Re: Quote from CEO of Nat. Archives, UK


"Ian Goddard" <goddai01@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:rcmdnbLGZ6ygPAnbnZ2dnUVZ8sqjnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Don Moody wrote:


use the word cooking? And if you are interested in human beings
of
that name your search will not pick up the posh Browne. Herr Braun
will be nowhere to be seen, So machine search without post hoc
human

Soundex should help.

Lots of tactics will 'help' but none guarantee success. For an
example, Soundex might pick up Baine, Bayne, Ban. Bane and quite a few
others if I was chasing Bain; bit it wouldn't pick up Whitehead,
Weisskopf and Montblanc which are the same name in different
disguises.


Visual databases will come and will be self-indexing. But it
wouldn't
surprise me greatly if it is one of my grandsons who turns the
present
shoeboxes full of unlabelled photographs into a usable database.

If he gets himself a copy of Informix >6 with the appropriate
datablade he
could make a start on that right now! (I might just have thought of
a
project for myself.)

'Appropriate' is the weasel word here. It would do, for example,
exactly no good at all in the collection of retinal scans I mentioned
before. Because nobody yet knows what is appropriate. Nobody yet knows
what questions could be asked of that collection if it were turned
into a database.

But these kinds of problem are not inherently insoluble, as evidenced
today by the announcement that a cuneiform tablet has at last been
read. That happens also to be an answer to the primacy of paper for
archiving. Baked clay has a much longer life - providing you don't
drop the tile.

Don


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