Bishop Resources Inc - News Release
Bishop moves forward on software development program
Bishop Resources Inc BRI
Shares issued 23,054,943 Oct 11 2001 close $.190
Friday Oct 12 2001 News Release
BISHOP RESOURCES INC. Vancouver, Canada FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 12, 2001 Bishop Reports Significant Progress on Software Development Programs * Beta test system released. * Compression of Data Base up to 17 Gigabytes completely "lossless" in retrieval. * Product documentation currently available on-line.
Bishop Resources' pending wholly owned subsidiary, NYSCo, doing business as Bishop Intelligence, has issued the following status report on its software development program:
To date, apart from its pending defence-related programs, the company has forced the pace in three entirely separate skill-based verticals, both to demonstrate the flexibility and universality of the DEX, and to enable the widest possible beta testing to take place. These vertical markets are:
insurance industry actuaries;
data migration specialists in the data warehousing space; and
logistics management specialists.
In each of the above verticals, the company has identified and is in preliminary discussions with major players in the United Kingdom market. Bishop Intelligence (BI) is hopeful that initial agreements will be reached within the next three months that will enable the companies involved to be identified as customers, or at minimum beta customers.
The company inherited the Plumber visual modelling environment and the Tomahawk in-memory infobase, as demonstrable and usable technologies, known by the early nomenclature DP & MS release 1.1f. The software has since been renamed DEX. A specialist software development company in Gloucester was engaged to undertake further development of the demonstrator system into a beta test product that would precede the release of the software in marketable form. The development process is jointly directed by Geoff Snare (chief technical officer of BI) and Dr. Tom Longshaw (BI, director of development).
On May 31, 2001, an interim beta test system (DEX rel. 1.1g) was released for internal testing. This release marks a major step in the transformation of DEX to being a marketable and supportable software product, acceptable to users as a standalone package. Major new advances have been made in all parts of the system, both at the Tomahawk level with the new automated database builder. A key feature of the DEX software, upon market launch, will be that it is usable by any professional user of data. The company is making significant progress to realizing this goal at all levels, and is delighted to announce that the latest beta release of DEX is now in test.
The demonstrator system inherited from DERA required a high level of technical expertise to populate the in-memory Tomahawk database. Bishop has now eliminated this requirement so that the user is able to point the new "DEX Builder" facility at a data source, and DEX Builder will then build and design the database automatically, with no intervention from the user.
The DEX Builder will typically shrink the size of the file by between three and 10 times, thus allowing the in-memory Tomahawk to accommodate databases of up to approximately 10 to 17 gigabytes in original size. The compression factor depends on the inherent cardinality of the original data.
A key, and unique, benefit delivered by DEX is that the data compression is completely lossless in its effect -- the data are retrievable and queriable exactly as if there had been no compression at all. DEX therefore delivers access to very large quantities of data in memory on desktop machines, enabling complex analysis to be carried out almost in real time. A typical measure against any conventional database of comparable size would be 50 to 60 times faster query resolution time.
The DEX Builder supports the CSV (Comma Separated Values) file format, which is one of the simplest and most widely used data export formats available. DEX will include componentry allowing the conversion of most popular file formats to CSV, by the GA (generally available) release date early in 2002.
The DEX Builder is a Plumber component, demonstrating the incredible flexibility of the DEX visual definition capability. The DEX Builder user interface includes support for entering fields, extracting field names from the source data and a series of appropriate consistency checks. The system also displays details of the build steps being run, feedback on DEX Builder errors and data conversion warnings without the user having to access a log file.
An optional test facility has been included to enable success estimation. This samples the build and estimates time to build, memory required, and hard disk space required. The user is warned if their machine may not have sufficient resources to complete the build. Whether or not this process is executed, a graceful exit is enabled from the DEX Builder if the apparently available RAM or disk space is exceeded during the build process.
Since Since 1.1g, two further beta releases (1.1h and 1.1i) have been cut, each of which have reduced the bug level in the software and have provided a complete view transformation ability for DEX Builder, allowing the product to access two separate files from source data or databases, transforming a relational view into the Infobase as a single view inside DEX. Great strides have been made in the documentation of the product, including the following, all of which are currently available on-line: PlumberEssence, AverageExample, HowTo, Scripting DEX-Plumber, CommandLineArguments, TypesInPlumber, Expression, Compiler, Package, Interfacing To Native Code, Component Writing, BugsInPlumber, Manual on using DEX-Plumber in DEX(tm).
Bishop Intelligence is currently adapting military software technology exclusively licensed to NYSCo by QinetiQ, one of Europe's largest research and development companies, and formerly an agency of the U.K. Ministry of Defence, known as the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). QinetiQ employs approximately 8,000 of Britain's scientists, incorporating non-nuclear research, technology, and test and evaluation establishments.
The NYSCo technologies, originally code-named Tomahawk and Plumber, have their roots in proven military applications and as such have been designed and improved over the past decade to handle stream data in a totally unique and powerful way. NYSCo firmly believes that the commercial products it is now planning to adapt from Tomahawk and Plumber have the capability to revolutionize the information processing and programming software markets.
Bishop Intelligence recently confirmed a pending contract with a leading European defence contractor on behalf of a major international government client for the development of operational analysis and data management tools. BI anticipates significant follow-on business as it begins to prove its ability to provide governments and their agencies with an independent and impartial decision-making process through BI's revolutionary, rapid information analysis capability.
BI's emerging products are developed to radically improve the process by which data are turned into and used as information. Users, who have no program training or experience, will be able to access and analyze their information sources, make key corporate decisions, and react to changing business conditions faster, more efficiently and more effectively than currently possible with existing conventional technology.
"There is probably no faster technology in existence. Such a capability has often been envisioned, but as far as we are aware any previous, commercially available, software products have never delivered it," stated Robin Bloor, chief executive officer, Bloor Research, one of Europe's leading IT research and consultancy groups.
The acquisition of all the issued and outstanding shares of NYSCo by Bishop Resources is subject to shareholder and exchange approval, which approvals are currently being sought by management of Bishop and NYSCo.
WARNING: The company relies upon litigation protection for "forward-looking" statements.
(c) Copyright 2001 Canjex Publishing Ltd. canada-stockwatch.com
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