Overview

netXtract provides two complementary tools to help you find, evaluate, navigate, save and retrieve information from the web documents your are browsing:

• netXtract Browser add-on
• netXtract Knowledge Base Manager

1. The netXtract browser add-on helps you evaluate and navigate on-line documents, while you are viewing them in your browser. It provides the following services:
   • "on-the-fly" word indexing of the current document you have opened in IE: You get a list of all words in the document, each with its occurence. You can sort the list alphabetically (ascending or descending) or by the number of occurences (ascending or descending). The default sort order can be set in Preferences.
   • automatic filtering of irrelevant words: netXtract has a list of common words that should be ignored and those words will not show up in the index. This is called the "Ignore Dictionary" and you can add or remove words from it, like with any other netXtract dictionary.
   • automatic filtering of indexed words against a dictionary of words of your choice: netXtract allows you to create your own list of words. Such a list is called a Dictionary. Then you can use any dictionary to filter against the index of the current document. The result is that only words from that dictionary which are also in the document will appear in the index. Usually, you would create discipline or interest-specific Dictionaries, which you can use to look at a document from the point of view of that dicipline or area of interest.
   • automatic assessment of document relevancy: after indexing the current document, netXtract will determine how relevant that document if based on the discipline or interest-specific Dictionaries you have created. The top 3 most relevant areas are displayed, for instance: Legal (very high), Computers (high), Financial (low).
   • extraction of all text contexts associated with a displayed indexed word: from the word index list simply select one and you will get all contexts in which the word appears in the document. The default context size is 5 words before and 5 words after the particular word you have chosen; the context size can be set in Preferences.
   • immediate navigation to a selected context: by quickly scanning all the contexts of a word you have selected you may determine that you are interested in reading the whole paragraph in which that context was found. By simply selecting that context, netXtract will locate, scroll to, and highlight the context in the document, in IE's main window.
   • ability to save a selected context to the netXtract Knowledge Base: netXtract allows you to save any context of interest to you. You may categorize each context you save, edit it with your own comments, change the title and enter keywords for it. This allows you to build a Knowledge Base of pieces of information that you found interesting while reading documents in your browser.
   • ability to save any text selection from IE to the netXtract Knowledge Base: netXtract allows you to not only save the extracted contexts of words to the Knowledge Base, but any particular range of text that you may find interesting. By simply selecting the text of interest and right-clicking you can save even an entire document to your machine, in your personal Knowledge Base.
   
   The netXtract browser add-on has been designed to be integrated within IE. Most netXtract functions can be accessed through standard Window's methods such as menus or right clicks.

2. the netXtract Knowledge Base Manager allows you to manipulate the Knowledge Base you have built using the saving features in the browser add-on. It offers a variety of ways to look at the saved data:
   • by category, based on the n-tier hierarchical tree of categories you have created
   • by date saved (by year, month or day)
   • by associated keywords
   • by original server URL
   The Knowledge Base Manager also allows:
   • re-opening of the document from a saved entry, at the original location on the Web in your web browser. This allows you to go back to the original source of any Knowledge Based entry that you have saved, in its original context.
   • free text searches against your personal Knowledge Base with many options for narrowing the results (filtering by date, limiting the search to title and / or keywords, matching capitalization, etc). The results of a search are not replaced by the next search: all search results are kept until you clear them.
   • editing any saved entry
   • moving entries between categories
   • deleting an entry, a whole category, or by date (i.e. all entries saved in March, 1999), by keyword or by original server URL (i.e. all entries saved from "www.badserver.com").
   
   All these features are presented in a Windows graphical user interface that complies with the most recent recommendations for Windows applications: toolbars, context menus, tool tips, etc.
   
   Contents