Ideas Developed

Contact Me

I develop ideas

To refine information

To serve my clients.

Rules-Based Applications

The rules-based Document Cleanser developed from my work at Connaught Drug Laboratories in Toronto.

The contract involved the conversion of over a thousand WordPerfect documents to Microsoft Word 6.0 format, all documents to be coerced into a regulatory standard format for content and style.

At the end of the project I realized that the conversion process was straightforward (almost!) – open the document and save it in Word format – and the coercion process was rarely little else than a series of Find-and-Replace statements.

The climax came when we had to locate all human names in all the documents and revise them when they were shown to have "left the firm", "changed title", and so on.

Name analysis is one of my strong points. (Please see " Prospecting Tools ")

Read more on Document Conversion .

Interesting Words Engine

The Interesting Words Engine started as the core of an indexing tool I wrote while engaged in developing courseware for Louis Florence at Vision Computer Associates in Toronto.

As a Senior Instructor I was often called on to develop specialized course material for specific clients.

Everybody loves an index and no-one loves creating one, because it involves the manual placement of hundreds of little {XE} fields.

I hate work, so I wrote the Indexer.

The Indexer is another rules-based front-end that allows the user to specify what makes a word interesting according to a set of six simple and generic commands.

The rules table is passed to the Interesting Words Engine which identifies all the interesting words in the document and tags them with {XE} fields before invoking Word's Index generator.

It is, quite simply, a hands-free one-click (literally!) index generator .

The meat is in the engine.

If you can locate all the interesting words in a sentence, a paragraph, or a document, or a set of documents, you can perform critical statistical analysis on that text.

A Precis-generator that far exceeds Microsoft's offering is instantly available.

For ThinkSmith Corporation of Toronto I developed an application that took an unsolicited stream of text, analyzed each paragraph, ranked each paragraph by interesting words, allocated a text-level style, and then went on to decide (a) where a heading level paragraph should have been placed, but wasn't and (b) developed the text for that heading paragraph based on the Interesting Words.

Information - apparently out of thin air!

Read more about Interesting Words .

Prospecting Tools

I am a prospector.

I prospect for clients.

I do this by searching all the information sources available to me, amongst them the local news service Canada News Wire .

From my financial data accumulation project performed for Wickham Investment Counsel Inc of Hamilton Ontario – analyzing corporate fiscal data by a batch process from three web sources – I developed strong techniques in retrieval of data from well-formed web pages.

The rules-based application Weather-Vain trawls news articles from Canada News Wire on a daily basis, retrieving about 250 news stories a day for archival analysis ( hard drives are cheap ) and selecting two to four articles for immediate review.

One new prospect per working day is 200 suitable prospects a year.

Allied with Weather Vain is the tool FFInf ("For Further INFormation") which extracts personal details from a document.

The two tools work in harmony to produce a daily listing of Name, Title, Email and Phone Number for every contact listed in every story in Canada News Wire on a daily basis.

(The good news is that the CEO's direct line is given; a wonderful fall-back number when making contact becomes difficult).

Read more about Prospecting Tools .

Team-Building Tools

The traditional approach is to assemble a team of programmers to develop a computer program.

I have developed a computer program that helps to build a team!

Programmers have stories of writing code and realizing that they are duplicating their efforts of a few months before, but can't remember where the code resides.

The code is, of course, spinning around on a hard drive somewhere, but where?

For myself I built an application that harvests every scrap of VBA code across a hard drive (DOC, DOT, XLS, XLA, PPT, PPA, BAS, CLS, FRM, TXT) and assembles it into a rather long string of characters.

Searching the string with a InStr() function is blindingly fast.

Representing all found functions, identified by their Path, File, Module and Procedure Name, with the search string highlighted takes about one tenth of a second; quite acceptable.

Bingo! Now I know where I used the code fragment.

A colleague in the UK asked for a copy, and built his own library.

The most natural thing for us to do was to share our code via the two library strings.

Consider this application turned loose on a network of programmers computers.

Locating a code fragment identifies the folder in which that fragment resides, and that identifies a senior team member for the newcomer.

And a visit to that team member helps cement relationships.

Read more about Team Building .

Contact Me

Chris Greaves

Develops rules-based applications to serve end-users and developers.

• Chris specializes in the collection and dissection of knowledge

• Is an independent consultant providing document-processing tools to companies around the world

• Began his career at ICL's Software Development Center (SDC) where he designed and developed languages and compilers, providing him with rich skills in string manipulation.

• Is a seasoned information systems and technology professional with more than 30 years of experience

• Produces flawless performance, and creating quantifiable results

• Has more than 25 years in the software industry.

• His focus is on promoting client-owned rules-based technology,

• Has promoted a culture where "The answer is always YES" enables clients to achieve what they had previously thought was impossible.

• Recently brought an innovative, automated prospecting service to Canadian transitional entrepreneurs.

• Has a keen grasp of the business of creating maximum results with minimum labor costs

• Develops procedures that streamline and standardize the creation, storage and retrieval of information, and transform the way users contribute to their organization's success.

Chris's solutions are strongly-formed, highly adaptable, fully featured and easy-to-use

Chris's clients include Hoffman la Roche; ESBE Scientific; Resource Management Strategies Inc.; the Law Society of Upper Canada; Cyberklix Inc.; Ontario Institute for Cancer Research; Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario; Westway Machinery; Watson Process Systems; Basic Business Intelligence and Wickham Investment Counsel Inc.;

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