Articles and white papers

• Local Search: The Internet Is the Yellow Pages (128K pdf) in IEEE Computer, vol. 38, no. 2, February, 2005
  This article outlines Marty's vision for the future of geographically-enabled search on the Internet. The Internet has not captured much of the annual $22 billion spent on local advertising in the US, because it generally provides a disappointing user experience.
  This article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the current sources of local content on the Internet. It also describes the first large scale effort to geo-enable web content, a joint project between Vicinity and Northern Light, publicly available from 2000-2002.
  It proposes a framework, the Internet Derived Yellow Pages, that allows businesses to directly create and maintain a rich stratum of local content. This structured content can either be used as a standalone directory, or combined with the rich local content that already exists on the Internet.
• Finders, Keepers: Efficient point-spatial searching in relational databases  in Intelligent Enterprise, vol. 5, no. 3, Feb. 1, 2002

  The demand for databases that can perform efficient location-based searching is increasing, fueled by mobile applications, and users' expectations for database systems to duplicate functionality available on the Internet. This article discusses how efficient location-based searching can be added to database systems.

• Cooperative Processing in Database Programming and Design, vol. 2, no. 10, Oct. 1989

  An article from the early days of micro-mainframe, client-server systems. The article discusses the appropriate distribution of function between PCs and mainframe database servers. It describes the equivalent of database stored procedures, before stored procedures were widely available from database vendors.

• Competitive Opportunities of EDI in EDI World, vol. 1, no. 6, June 1991

• An Introduction to Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability, a NEC Technologies white paper, March 1995

  This extended white paper discusses the basic concepts of high availability systems. It discusses the causes of system faults, preventive and corrective measures for achieving high availability, and hardware and software components of high availablity systems.

Patents

• A Method and Apparatus of Expanding Web Searching Capabilities, Marty Himmelstein, Charlie Goldensher, Jerry Halstead, and Dwight Aspinwall, assigned to Microsoft Corporation. United States Patent 6,701,307 issued March 2, 2004

  This patent describes the authors' groundbreaking work on geo-enabling web content. It discusses methods for detecting geographic content in web pages, assigning geographic coordinates to that content, and generating efficient spatial keys that search applications can treat as normal text. Search applications use these spatial keys to allow users to search for content within a specified geographic radius. These techniques can be used for document collections other than the web.

• A Method and Apparatus for Efficient Proximity Searching, Charlie Goldensher and Marty Himmelstein, assigned to Microsoft Corporation. United States Patent 6,282,540 issued August 28, 2001
  Using an RDBMS to to do spatial proximity searching for a combination of spatial and non-spatial attributes is challenging. This patent describes a method that is fast and scalable. The work was motivated by the demanding response time and throughout requirements of large spatially-enabled web databases.

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