Boston, MA May 4, 2008 -- Stephen A. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com announced the Evvie "best paper award" for 2008 on Day Two of Infonortics' Boston Search Engine Meeting.

Charles Clarke of University of Waterloo won the award for best paper. The work, "XML Retrieval: Problems and Potential," explained that XML (Extensible Markup Language) is no panacea, but that properly used, XML systems create new ways to make search more useful to users. Clarke is an associate professor for the School of Computer Science at the university in Waterloo, Ontario. He received a cash prize and an engraved Evvie award.

Richard Brath of Oculus was named runner-up for his paper "Search, Sense-Making and Visual User Interfaces." In this paper, Brath demonstrated that user interface becomes as important as the underlying content processing functions for search. Brath is a partner at Oculus, a provider of innovative business visualization software solutions. He received an engraved Evvie award.

The Evvie is given in honor of Ev Brenner, one of the leaders in online information systems and functions. The award was established after Brenner's death in 2006. Brenner served on the program committee for the Boston Search Engine Meeting since its inception almost 20 years ago. He had two characteristics that made his participation a signature feature of each year's program: He was willing to tell a speaker or paper author to "add more content," and after a presentation, he would ask a presenter one or more penetrating questions that helped make a complex subject more clear.
The Evvie is sponsored by ArnoldIT.com to keep Brenner's push for excellence squarely in the minds of the speakers and the conference attendees.

This year's judges were Dr. Liz Liddy, Syracuse University, Dr. David Evans, Just Systems (Tokyo), and Sue Feldman, IDC Content Technologies Group. Liddy heads the Center for Natural Language Processing. Evans, founder of Clairvoyance, is one of the foremost authorities on search. Feldman is one of the leading analysts in the search, content processing, and information access market sector.

About Stephen E. Arnold and Arnold Information Technology

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at arnoldit [dot com. For more information about Arnold IT, contact Stuart Schram, chief technology officer, at (502) 228-1966. The company's Web site is arnoldit [dot com.