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TECHNICAL DETAILS
Technical Details-How Percevia™ Works
There are three fundamental
components that make up a Percevia™ database: Objects, Attributes and Values.
Figure 1 below shows how they are related.
Figure 1 How the Object, Attributes
and Values are related.
Objects
Objects represent the things you are
looking up in your collection. The object you eventually identify is called the
"target". For example if you're creating a field guide to birds, each bird would
be an object. If you're making a buyers guide to Pocket PC devices, each object
would be a particular Pocket PC. Percevia™ can handle up to 32,000 objects,
limited mainly by the amount of hard disk space on your computer. For a field
guide to birds of the United States you would need 2000 objects in your
database.
Attributes
Objects are made up of things called
Attributes. Attributes are the "characteristics" that your objects have in
common. For example, the attributes of bird objects would be eyes, wings, feet,
and tail feathers. Coin object attributes consist of country of origin, shape,
denomination, material, color, and image. Baseball attributes would be a picture
of the player, batting average, year created, and so on. These attributes are
used to distinguish your objects and to give them an identity that can be used
later for searching. So a subject that is appropriate for Percevia™ needs to be a
definable as collection whose objects have common characteristics. Attributes
come in five "flavors" in Percevia™: text, number, image, sound and HTML.
Values
Attributes are made of things called
Values. Values are items which distinguish the attribute of one object from the
attributes of another object and are common to all objects. For example, in the
case of birds, the "eye color" attribute has the values of yellow, black, brown and so on.
For the Bird database, the value of the Barn Owl eye color
attribute is brown, while the value of the Burrowing Owl eye color attribute is
yellow. In the case of a coin collection database, a "denomination" attribute
may have the values of 1 cent, 5 pesos, etc. In the case of a sports card
collection, the value of the Nolan Ryan game-type attribute is "baseball" while
the value of the Jerry Rick game-type attribute is "football". As you can see in
Figure 1 every object has a collection of attributes, and every attribute has a
collection of values.
Figure 2 How the Object, Attributes
and Values are related in a Bird database.
In Figure 2 we show an example of a
bird identification database. Here the objects are the birds themselves, such as
Bald Eagle, Barn Owl, etc. In the figure we show just two of many attributes, a
text attribute which we call Bird Type, and a number attribute which we call
Length. The possible values for Bird Type are Hawks and Owls, while the possible
values for Length are 38.5 inches and 17 inches. As you can see in Figure 2 we
have made the values that are used for each bird object in bold and the ones
that are not used in light gray. We refer to a used value as "assigned" and an
unused value as "unassigned".
Compared to Adobe Acrobat
The relationship between the
Percevia™ Database Editor and Percevia™ Explorer is similar to that of Adobe
Acrobat. Acrobat uses a universal format called PDF for storing documents. A
"reader" is required on the client to view this document on the PC. An editor is
used to create the Acrobat PDF file. Percevia™ creates a visual database called
IZX for storing searchable documents. A reader is required on the client to
search this visual database format. An editor is used to create the Percevia™ IZX
file.
Editor, Database and Viewer
Objects, attributes and values are
created in the Percevia™ Editor (or Knowledge Manager) which runs on a standard
desktop PC, and are stored in a proprietary database storage file. Figure 3 shows
the relationship between the Editor, Viewer (Explorer) and database. Often we refer to the
Viewer as the "client" because we allow viewing on several mobile platforms,
including SmartPhones.
Figure 3 Relationship between
editor, viewer and database.
The Viewer (Percevia™ Explorer)
program allows you to select any one of the particular attributes you have
created, and then choose a value for it. From this information the program is
able to eliminate all the objects in the database that do not have the value you
chose for that attribute. The program then presents you with more attributes
from which you can select more values. Each time you select a value the program eliminates objects that do
not have the value, until you find the object you are attempting to identify.
Smart Attribute and Value
Elimination
Figure 4 Regular Search Algorithm
Figure 5 Percevia™ Search Algorithm.
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