Quicklooker

The very first search engine software was written by Rodolfo J. Martinez III while a staff engineer with Martin Marietta Corporation in 1986. Under a Systems Engineering and Integration (SEI) contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Martin Marietta helped the FAA manage the development among over 80 other projects, two Major System Acquisitions for the Air Traffic Consoles. The search engine developed by Martinez--He called it Quicklooker--was used to review and trace requirements in these two projects: source selection (Harris versus AT&T) for the Voice Switching and Control system (VSCS), and IBM's design and implementation of the Advance Automation System (AAS). Each of these systems had over 6000 system level requirement statements which were mapped into successively more detailed specifications and contractual documents (CDRL items). The documentation tree of these projects easily exceeded 400 documents of various kind each at different levels of development. These requirements covered effort representing over 5 billion dollars worth of development for the Air Traffic Controller console.
Quicklooker would take an English sentence and explore documents to determine the allocation, that is which statements in derived documents responded to the requirements. Results were presented in order of decreasing match with the matching words highlighted. The algorithm had two parts. The first part took as input a specification written using specification standards of the time, and converted it into a database. The second algorithm used seven criteria to determine maximum likelihood that a match is found. The results were presented in order of decreasing matching level. The seven criteria were used to evaluate a match: 1)word presence, 2) Word strength, 3) Word match count 4) Phrase contiguity, 5) Word order, 6) Word distance, and 7) Word ignoring.
The algorithms were developed using the Clipper compiler for DBase III type databases. Many members of the projects used the algorithms and these projects involved personnel from Harris Corporation (Melbourn Florida), MITRE, the FAA Advanced Automation Program (AAP) Directorate, Martin Marietta, ARINC and Logicon, and the FAA Technical Center (FAATC) in the Atlantic City New Jersey area. Formal citations corroborating the algorithm do not exists. However, project correspondence referred to its use was written and the algorithm source code exists with some of the converted documents.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu