Concept Searching Update
July 3, 2009
Founded in 2002, Concept Searching provides licensees with search, auto-classification, taxonomy management and metadata tagging solutions. You can download a fact sheet about the privately firm here. The software can be used on an individual user’s computer or mounted on servers to deliver enterprise solutions. The company’s secret sauce is its statistical metadata generation and classification method. The technology uses concept extraction and compound term processing to facilitate access to unstructured information. The company operates from Stevenage in Hertsfordshire. A list of the Concept Searching offices is here.
The company emphasizes the value of lateral thinking, and its approach to content analysis implements numerical recipes to find these insights and linkages within unstructured text.
When I updated my profile for this company earlier this year, I noted that the firm had signed Portal Solutions, a company that focuses on things Microsoft. The idea is to make it possible for a user to search for “insider dealing” and retrieve documents where that bound phrase does not appear but a related phrase such as “insider trading” does appear. This type of system appeals to intelligence officers and financial analysts. Concept Searching’s methods generated lists of related topics. You can see an example of the system in action by navigating to this page. I ran several test queries and the interface provided useful information and suggestions about other related content in the processed corpus. A screen shot of the output appears below:
Concept Searching is a Microsoft and Fast Search partner. The idea is that Concept Searching’s technology complements and in some cases extends the search and content processing services in Microsoft products. In May 2009, the company sponsored a best practices site for Microsoft SharePoint. The deal involves a number of companies, including ShemaLogic, KnowlegeLake, and K2 Technologies among others. The site is supposed to go live in the next couple of weeks, but I don’t have a url or a date at this time.
The company had a busy May, signing deals with Allianz Global Investors, Directory, and AT&T Government Solutions.
For me, the most interesting system that Concept Searching offers is its ability to generate and classify terms found in SharePoint documents into a taxonomy. The company has prepared a brief video that demonstrates this functionality. You can find the video here. The company’s approach does not require a separate index. Microsoft Enterprise Search can use the outputs of the Concept Searching system. I noted two “uniques” in the narrative to the video, and I remain skeptical about categorical affirmatives. I think the bound phrase extraction and the close integration with SharePoint are benefits. I just bristle when I hear “unique”, which means the one and only anywhere in the world. Broad assertion in my experience.
Concept Searching’s president, Martin Garland, said here:
Our intellectual property is still unique as we are the only statistical search technology able to indentify multi-word patterns within text and insert these patterns directly into the index at ingestion or creation time. We call this “Compound Term Processing”.
Last week I sat in a briefing given by one of Microsoft’s enterprise search team. I thought I heard descriptions of functions that struck me as quite similar to those performed by Concept Search and such companies as Interse in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I think it will be fruitful to watch what features and functions are baked into the upcoming Microsoft Fast ESP version of the old Fast Search & Transfer system. Remember: the roots of Fast Search stretch deep to 1997, a year before Google poked its nose from the Stanford baby crib.
Partners like Concept Searching have invested significant resources in Microsoft technologies. Will Microsoft respect these investments, or will Microsoft in an effort to recoup is $1.23 billion investment take a hard line toward such companies as Concept Searching.
I am on the fence regarding this issue.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
Comments
2 Responses to “Concept Searching Update”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Interestingly the CTO of Concept Searching previously worked at Smartlogik, which grew out of Muscat, the first company to successfully market a probabilistic search engine. The Xapian open source search engine was originally developed at Muscat.
our baby cribs are usually made from wood and i very much prefer wood over metal cribs”`;