"Have we ever done research on a given topic in the past and show me all relevant documents and people involved. Please also provide me with the phone numbers of those involved who are still with the company?"

Usually, answering such a question would take hours, if not days. A properly designed text search application, however, will return these results within just a few seconds. Text search applications are focused on disclosing textual information that is stored in a variety of systems, i.e.: file servers, document management systems, PDM systems, databases, etc. If necessary, these applications can be further enhanced using linguistic technologies like: entity extraction, part-of-speech tagging and taxonomies.