Convera Releases Twenty New Industry-Specific Plug-and-Play Semantic Network Cartridges.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 28, 2002

Convera Builds on Semantix Inc. Acquisition by Enhancing Accuracy and

Relevancy of Search, Retrieval and Categorization in Specialized

Vertical Fields

Convera (Nasdaq:CNVR) today announced the release of twenty domain-specific semantic network cartridges that significantly enhance enterprise search accuracy, relevancy and personalization.

The plug-and-play cartridges, which capitalize on Convera's recent acquisition of linguistic technology specialist Semantix Inc., allow customers to work with vocabularies more relevant to their specific business or industry.

The new pre-packaged cartridges seamlessly plug into Convera's RetrievalWare(R) enterprise search, retrieval and categorization solution, and join Convera's existing selection of cartridges that support a wide range of languages.

The twenty semantic network cartridges, fully supported by RetrievalWare's concept-based searching method, include thousands of terms and concepts unique to the following industries:

-- Army

-- Biology

-- Chemistry

-- Computers

-- Electronics

-- Finance

-- Food Science

-- Geography

-- Geology

-- Health Sciences

-- Information Science

-- Law

-- Mathematics

-- MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

-- Petroleum Natural Gas & Petrochemicals

-- Pharmacology

-- Physics

-- Plastics

-- Rubber

-- Telecommunications.

"RetrievalWare customers can now choose from a wide range of pre-defined semantic networks and vocabularies, and have the ability to refine and personalize the vocabularies they need to more effectively run their business," said Patrick Condo, president and CEO, Convera. "Our new industry-specific cartridges can be used as a complete out-of-the-box solution, can be combined with Convera's language cartridges, and can be edited to deliver further search precision. In addition, customers with existing dictionaries and language resources can deploy these cartridges as part of a larger solution."

As an example, the Finance cartridge contains nearly 35,000 terms and 14,000 concepts specific to this industry, such as standing mortgage loan, option writer, series HH savings bond and the synonyms and concepts associated with each of these words; Health Sciences contains nearly 165,000 terms and 65,000 concepts, and understands that the term "Beta Adrenergic Blocking Agent" is closely linked to the phrase "Anti-glaucoma Drug" and the brand names "Betoptic" and "OptiPranolol"; searchers using the Army cartridge will find relevant research about "armored combat vehicles" when looking for stories about "military tanks."

Among those who benefit from the release of the new cartridges are the vertical markets already targeted by Convera, including the government, financial and life sciences sectors. For example, Convera today serves over 70 intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and other countries.

The intelligence agencies, already engaged in mission-critical search applications concerning homeland security and intelligence gathering, can refine and personalize their RetrievalWare deployments by adding cartridges for Army, Chemistry or Geography, enabling them to work with vocabularies more relevant to their operations.

About RetrievalWare's Semantic Network

When a user enters a search query, RetrievalWare searches not only for exact word matches, but also for related words and idioms that may be relevant to the query. What makes this possible is RetrievalWare's concept-driven semantic network, comprising approximately 500,000 words and 1.6 million relationships, compiled from published electronic dictionaries and other lexical sources.

The semantic network pinpoints all relevant meanings without requiring users to think of every possible way of expressing their idea. For example, a user from the UK, searching a newspaper database for the articles on "the rising cost of petrol" will find all relevant articles on "increasing "gasoline prices."

About the Semantix Inc. Acquisition

Convera acquired Semantix, now known as Convera Canada, in March, 2002. The Semantix acquisition broadens the linguistic capabilities of Convera's RetrievalWare(R), specifically in the areas of cross-lingual search and the continued development of language capabilities to help build solutions for enterprise and government customers that search, retrieve and categorize unstructured information in multiple languages and in specialized vertical fields.

About Convera's RetrievalWare

RetrievalWare is a high-performance multimedia, cross- and multi-lingual search system that allows broad flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets.

RetrievalWare enables users to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, over 200 proprietary document formats (such as word processors and publishing systems), relational database tables, document management systems, and groupware repositories.

Advanced search capabilities that can be used independently or interactively to enable the highest levels of accuracy include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching, and query-by-example. RetrievalWare excels in distributed client/server environments with thousands of users, documents, images, and/or multiple media assets.

About Convera

Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search, retrieval and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages.

More than 750 customers in over 29 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more.

For more information, contact Convera at 800-788-7758, via e-mail at [e-mail] or on the Web at www.convera.com.

This release, including any statements from Convera personnel, contains statements about Convera's future expectations, performance, plans, and prospects, as well as assumptions about future events. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including without limitation, business and economic conditions and trends; continued success in technological advances; possible disruption in commercial activities caused by terrorist activity and armed conflict, such as changes in logistics and security arrangements; reduced customer demand relative to expectations; competitive factors; and other risk factors listed from time to time in the company's SEC reports. Actual results may differ materially from our expectations as the result of these and other important factors relating to Convera's business and product development efforts, which are further described in Convera's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings can be obtained from the SEC's website located at www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to Convera on the date of this release, and Convera assumes no obligation to update such statements.

The Convera design logo and the following are worldwide trademarks of Convera: Convera(TM), RetrievalWare(R), and Screening Room(R). The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.