Mistral is an
information retrieval system
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...
designed and produced by the French company
CII in the 1970s, which quickly became known internationally.
History
Mistral was created in 1970 to meet the needs of CNEXO (now
IFREMER
IFREMER (Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer; ) is an oceanographic institution in Brest, France.
Scope of works
Ifremer focuses its research activities in the following areas:
* Monitoring, use and enhancement of coa ...
). This version was still rudimentary and was designed for a time when disk space was very expensive, and therefore used
magnetic tapes
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnet ...
and only sequential processing was allowed.
Subsequently, CII considered Mistral a flagship product for the
Iris 80
Iris most often refers to:
*Iris (anatomy), part of the eye
*Iris (mythology), a Greek goddess
* ''Iris'' (plant), a genus of flowering plants
* Iris (color), an ambiguous color term
Iris or IRIS may also refer to:
Arts and media
Fictional ent ...
and
Iris 50
The Iris 50 computer is one of the computers marketed by the French company CII as part of plan Calcul at the end of the 1960s. Designed for the civilian market, it was produced from 1968 to 1975 and was the successor to the CII 10070 (SDS Sigma ...
systems and maintained a strong development team. It was able to produce a series of versions which brought significant improvements, for example:
* Transition from tape to
magnetic disk
Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ac ...
*
Thesaurus introduction,
* Indexing of free-form text fields,
* Interactive mode, first in
transaction mode then in
time-sharing
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1
Its emergence a ...
.
In 1978, Mistral was chosen for the creation of a "national server center" (), .
After 1977, Mistral was ported to
Honeywell
Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...
GCOS7 and
GCOS8.
Paradoxically, this success led to the gradual end of Mistral's life. Part of the initial team joined this new company. On the other hand, with the tribulations of CII, the support was more reduced. Finally, the use of this software by a documentation center seemed complex, and products that were less efficient but easier to access, and in particular , multiplied.
Technical characteristics
Bibliographic file
Mistral manages
bibliographic records A bibliographic record is an entry in a bibliographic index (or a library catalog) which represents and describes a specific resource. A bibliographic record contains the data elements necessary to help users identify and retrieve that resource, as ...
which are stored in bibliographic files. Entries are stuructured as a set of fields which can be of three types:
* reference — mandatory and unique, it contains a key allowing the record to be uniquely designated;
* monovalued — field whose content is reduced to a single value (for example the title);
* multivalued — field whose content consists of a list of values separated by a separator (configurable), for example an author field.
Inverted files
Mistral works with an
inverted index structure which is implemented as
indexed sequential files. The configuration provides some flexibility by allowing, for example, the grouping together several fields in the same index. The software package has a set of tools for managing or reorganizing these files.
See also
*
IBM STAIRS
The IBM Storage and Information Retrieval System, better known by the acronym STAIRS, was a program providing storage and online free-text search of text data. STAIRS ran under the OS/360 operating system under the CICS or IMS transaction moni ...
*
SPIRES
*
BRS/Search
References
Information retrieval systems
History of computing in France
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