Established in 1987, Contegra Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of data integration services featuring custom user-interface design, full-text search, navigation, and text classification software. Contegra Systems has created comprehensive content integration solutions for clients in the legal, scientific, technical and medical publishing, heavy equipment manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and technology industries.

Pike & Fischer, Inc., a Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. company, selected Contegra Systems to develop its legal reference services. Originally designed for CD-ROM, Pike & Fischer’s legal reference products required extensive training and technical support to navigate. Users were also unable to search across all content, impeding their access to potentially meaningful sources. Pike & Fischer sought a transformation of its services into straightforward, comprehensive Web-based products, and entrusted their vision to Contegra Systems’ knowledge and experience.

“We selected Contegra because of their track record in assisting with the development of successful information products,” said Meg Hargreaves, President and Publisher at Pike & Fischer. “Contegra’s experience in assisting with similar technology projects for information providers made them a perfect fit.”

To bring Pike & Fischer’s services to the next level, Contegra sought a sophisticated search engine and designed a new user interface. Contegra wanted this combination to allow for complex queries, and yet be simple enough for a novice to operate. “Corporate, government, and legal professionals have very specific information needs, and we wanted to make sure the results returned would be valuable to them,” said Rob Wiesenberg, President of Contegra Systems.

“An effective search engine is a critical and often overlooked aspect of information product design,” continued Mr. Wiesenberg. “It’s very easy to provide documents to the user. The hard part is delivering relevant documents that meet the user’s needs. The simplest approach, basing the relevance of results on the frequency of search terms, presents problems because it weights important and unimportant words equally. For example, if you search on ‘3G Wireless Regulations’, the simple approach might return documents in which ‘Wireless’ and ‘Regulations’ appear frequently but not in the context of ‘3G.’ Ranking results by relevance gives priority to the material a customer would most likely find useful, making the search process much simpler and quicker. For example, general words like ‘Wireless’ and ‘Regulations‘ might be weighted less in determining relevance than a more specific term like ‘3G.’”

Contegra selected dtSearch as the search engine that would best meet Pike & Fischer’s requirements. Contegra then migrated Pike & Fischer’s data to XML and outputted to HTML, in order to support the new search and navigation features. “We chose dtSearch for its features and functionality, scalability, and price value. Its ease of implementation, too, is critical for ensuring that we deliver a timely, economical solution,” said Mr. Wiesenberg.

“Users can now easily narrow searches by criteria, such as docket number, document number, citation, date parameters and keywords, and search across all content, or within results,” said Mr. Wiesenberg. “They can even perform full-text searches within specific documents, a feature that is very helpful for long legal text.”

To complete the equation in developing an effective product, Contegra designed a user interface that maintained a strong brand identity with Pike & Fischer’s corporate site, and would be intuitive and attractive to users. Contegra’s work on the usability, aesthetics, and functionality of Pike & Fischer’s reference products have been a big success. “The door of my office is plastered with printouts of positive feedback from early users of the new sites,” said Ms. Hargreaves.

“One Communications lawyer said, ‘Pike & Fischer’s new Communications Regulation Web site is a rarity — a collection of improvements that actually do improve!’” continued Ms. Hargreaves. “In regards to the Internet Law & Regulation Web service, another client commented: ‘One of the best-organized Web sites I've seen. It's all there, even the little details.’”

In such a competitive marketplace, picking up additional market share is no easy task. “But,” Ms. Hargreaves said, “we realized that we could never achieve our goals by simply standing still. We elected to redesign our Web product from square one. During this process, we listened to our users and selected an experienced technology partner. It is obvious from the users’ response that we made the right business decision.”

Communications Regulation (http://commreg.pf.com), Pike & Fischer’s flagship product, was named a 2005 Codie Finalist for Best Online Government Information Service. Other Web services redesigned with Contegra Systems are the Broadcast (http://broadcastregs.pf.com), Cable (http://cableregs.pf.com), and Wireless (http://wirelessregs.pf.com) FCC Rules sites, and the Internet Law and Regulations site (http://www.ilrweb.com).

For more information on Contegra Systems’ data integration services, please call (914) 328-2269 or email info@contegrasystems.com. You can also visit Contegra on the Web at www.contegrasystems.com.