Chiliad: Virtual Information Sharing

February 14, 2012

In 1999, Christine Maxwell, who created the “Magellan” search engine, Paul McOwen, co-founder of the National Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval for the National Science Foundation, and Howard Turtle, former chief scientist at West Publishing, formed Chiliad with the intention of creating a business-to-consumer shopping site with a natural language search engine.

And then September 11, 2001, happened. Chiliad turned its attention to the intelligence community. In 2007, with the FBI as its largest client, the company received $1.6 million in funding from a joint development project with various intelligence and military agencies to enhance Chiliad’s cross-agency knowledge fusion capability by tightly integrating cross-domain “trusted guard” capabilities to support distributed multi-level-security and by enhancing collaboration tools. For the past several years, every time someone at the FBI wanted to search for a name in its Investigative Data Warehouse, technology from Chiliad was working in the background.

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Another outfit which connects dots. But Chiliad connects all the dots. Hmm. A categorical affirmative, and I don’t think this is possible.

Chiliad has solved two challenging problems. The first is the ability to rapidly search data collections at greater scale than any other offering in the market. The second is to allow search formulation and analysis in natural language. It offers Chiliad Discovery/Alert, a platform for search and knowledge discovery to operate in parallel across distributed repositories of unstructured and structured data; Peer-to-Peer Architecture, which allows organizations to distribute instances of the search, indexing, and analysis engine in a network of cooperating nodes in local or remote distributed networks; Distributed Search, which provides a search capability that works seamlessly in amounts of structured and unstructured data; Filtering and Alerting Service for tracking and receiving alerts about new data in real time; Discover Knowledge service, an integral component of the Discovery/Alert platform used for navigation and discovery; Discovery/Alert Geospatial Service, an organizing concept for information; and Global Knowledge Discovery technology. Rather than moving data across the network to a central indexing system, Chiliad’s technology allows organizations to put a Discovery/Alert node wherever information is managed. Each node is part of a secure peer-to-peer network that allows a query to be executed in parallel across all locations.

The company serves investigative analysis, information security, and research and development applications; and government and intelligence, insurance, law enforcement, and life sciences healthcare industries. Because Chiliad’s product is a platform, it faces competition in the enterprise market from large, better known vendors, such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

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