Strange and Unusual Dictionaries

Fact City has started offering Thomson Financial information through its Fact City database. This information encompasses publicly-held companies. An easy place to access it is iWon at 
http://www.iwon.com/home/search/factcity_tutorial/0,14925,,00.html 

Fact City seems to have been working on the natural language interface for its fact databases; they're a little harder to mess up than they used to be. It's still possible, though. Fact City had no problem with questions like: 

What's the P/E ratio for MSFT?

What are the latest earnings for Duke Energy?

What is the price for Gardenburger? (It gave a trade date of 2/23/2001, though; don't use this database to track your stock price)

What's the 52-week high for LUV?

Fact City burped on the following questions:

What was the last earnings for tootsie roll? (Offered me information about the movie Tootsie; What was the last earnings for TR? did work) 

What was Amazon's latest dividend? (Offered me movie information)

I think the biggest problem with the database at this point is that the different topics -- sports, television, movies, finance -- are not separated out. It's reasonably certain that if I'm looking for information on my stock I'm not looking for information on Andy Griffith's movie career. If there was some way to limit the searches to one or another database, that would be excellent. 

Posted to Reference-Dictionaries