Cognatrix is compiled as a “universal binary”. It runs on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later. The minimum hardware requirements are the same as for Mac OS X itself. Naturally, more memory is always better. Macintosh gurus often recommend 2GB of RAM as a minimum and suggest 4GB for reasonable efficiency.

As far as we are aware, we have documented all Cognatrix limits either on this web site or in materials that can be downloaded from this web site (eg the demonstration version and user guide).

Whenever we use words or expressions to convey a sense of limitlessness (eg unlimited or no limit or as many as you need), we mean that there is no fixed limit imposed by the way in which Cognatrix is designed. But that is not to say that there is no absolute or practical limit imposed by Mac OS X, or your particular Macintosh hardware or, indeed, your own expectations.

For example, user-defined fields are stored in dictionaries where the name of a field such as Scope Note is the key to a string containing the scope note. Although Mac OS X defines a maximum limit on the length of a string (roughly 2 gigabytes), it is doubtful that anyone would want to enter more than a few kilobytes so, for all reasonable purposes, the size of a user-defined field is effectively unlimited. Likewise, the documentation for Mac OS X does not appear to cite any actual limit on the number of key+string pairs that can be stored in a dictionary so, for all reasonable purposes, there is no limit on the number of fields that a user may define.

Similarly, the programming structures used to represent thesaurus trees and items have been designed without fixed limits so, for all reasonable purposes, there are no limits on the numbers of items, attributes or relationships, or the depth of the taxonomy tree.

Nevertheless, in extreme cases, it is always possible that usability, storage and computational requirements will impact your expectations and/or system performance to the point where a practical limit will have been reached. This is one reason why we provide a demonstration version on this site: so that you can explore Cognatrix and assure yourself that it is appropriate to your needs before you decide to purchase.

As far as we are aware, Multisystems (the authors of MultiTes) do not publish specifications for their XML formats. Because of this, the support for MultiTes XML formats in both Cognatrix and CognatrixImporter is limited to what could be determined by inspecting example XML files made available to us during December 2006.