DB app recommendations?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Dan Goldstein wonders: <<My company wants to take a large amount of
proposal-related text (~10K pages), break it up into blocks of between 1
paragraph and 15 pages, and store the whole thing in a heavily
cross-referenced database, so text can be
pulled for use in future proposals.>>

This suggests you may need an industrial-strength database (e.g., Oracle,
DB2) rather than a standard PC system (e.g., Access), but I'll leave
specific recommendations to those with more experience with databases. If
you do opt for something like Access, confirm that it's capable of handling
such large amounts of text. Also look for features such as "exports tagged
text" (e.g., XML or RTF) so you'll have the minimum amount of reformatting
to do once you pour the text into a word processor or DTP software.

You may want to follow up with details on your actual software (seems to be
primarily Word?) and willingness to change (if there's a large productivity
benefit) so our database experts can warn you of any incompatibilities or
efficiencies they've encountered.

<<Much of the text will have to be scanned and OCR'd into the database, so
current doc formats are not much of an issue. What we have electronically is
principally in Word.>>

Watch out for the OCR. Even if it's 99.9% perfect (a difficult target), that
still means nearly 3 typos per 8.5x11 page. To really do this right, someone
must edit the scanned material carefully. Typos are the least of your
problems, though; you also need to be sure the text is relatively
independent of context so it can be reused; for example, you'll find lots of
page numbers cited and hardwired cross-references that must be dealt with
somehow. You'll also have to figure out which version to choose when (as is
likely the case) you find 200 similar "company information" blurbs (for
example): one of these is most current and will work best for reuse, but
some human will have to make the choice of which ones to keep and which to
discard.

Last but not least, hire a good editor to review the results of this
approach to single-sourcing. It's trivially easy (thus, common) to make
small errors with large consequences when you assemble the final manual. I
once owned a Pontiac station wagon whose owner manual had been
database-published in this manner, and several sections were clearly taken
from the manuals for an entirely different type of vehicle--and were thus
misleading or outright wrong for my car. The person doing this editing must
be clearly instructed to worry about more than grammer and wording: they
must first and foremost make sure that even multiply approved and copyedited
paragraphs make sense in the context of the current document. Often, they
won't without human intervention.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_

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