Delphes: A Linguistic System That Went Away
October 22, 2013
I have posted a profile of the now offline enterprise search vendor Delphes. You can access the write up at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
Delphes is an illustration of what happens when academic research becomes a commercial search system. From the notion of “soul” to the mind boggling complexity of a Swiss Army knife system, Delphes draws together the threads of the late 1980s and early 1990s best ideas in search. The problem was that selling, supporting, and making the many functions work on time and budget were difficult.
How many other vendors have followed in the trail blazed by Delphes? Quite a few. Some have largely been forgotten like DR Link. Others are still with us, but subsumed into even more complex, over arching systems like Hewlett Packard’s blend of print management and Autonomy.
Reviewing a draft of my analyses of Delphes, several points struck me:
First, Delphes was one of the first search system to combine the almost mystical with the nuts and bolts of finding information in an organization.
Second, Delphes included a number of languages, but it was French language centric. Many search systems are English centric. So the approach of Delphes makes some of the linguistic issues clear.
Third, Delphes’ explanation and diagrams are quite fresh. I have seen similar diagrams in the marketing hoo-hah of many 2013 vendors.
Keep in mind that these profiles will not be updated or maintained. I am providing the information because some students may find the explanations, diagrams, and comments of interest. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. If you want to use this for commercial purposes, please, contact me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Remember. I am almost 70 years old and some of the final versions of these profiles commanded hefty fees. IDC, for example, charges $3,500 for some of the profiles I have created. Are my views worth this lofty price? In my view, that is an irrelevant question since some vendors in Massachusetts just sell the stuff, keep all the money, and leave the addled goose floating in the pond.
A reader reminded me that some big outfits have taken my work and reused it, sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Well, these are for your personal use. As for the big firms, those managers are just so darned skilled any action they take is admirable. Don’t you agree?
Enjoy the tale of Delphes.
Stephen E Arnold, October 22, 2013
Xenky Search Vendor Profile: Entopia
October 15, 2013
I have posted a profile of the now offline enterprise search vendor Entopia. You can access the write up at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
Entopia is an interesting case. The company, like Endeca and Fast Search & Transfer, had embraced the idea that information access was the DNA of an organization. With access to information and metadata, a manager could make better decisions. The marketers jumped on the bandwagon and rolled out some fancy buzzwords to surround the incredibly complex Entopia system.
The Entopia approach is, in my opinion, one that took the SAP R/3 massive reengineering of work processes and applied the notion to information. Entopia included Tacit type tracking to identify people who were centers of influence in a company, search, concepts, automatic indexing, semantics, etc.
The only problem was that the cost of implementing the system once a client had been found was high. In 2006, the company wound down. The firm is still offline, but its very ambitious explanations of what information could do inspired many other vendors.
Like Convera, Entopia described a wonderful world of information access. The problem was and still is delivering in a way that meets users’ expectations and delivers a visible, easily documented payoff to the organization buying the dream and the software.
The profiles will not be updated or maintained. I am providing the information because some students may find the explanations, diagrams, and comments of interest. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. If you want to use this for commercial purposes, please, contact me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Remember. I am almost 70 years old and some of the final versions of these profiles commanded hefty fees. A reader reminded me that some big outfits have taken my work and reused it, sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Well, these are for your personal use.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2013
Xenky Search Vendor Profile: Convera
October 9, 2013
I have begun to put up early drafts of profiles I have written over the years. These are descriptions and commentary about vendors of search, content processing, and analytics systems.
The first profile to go live is one of my early analyses of Convera, a vendor which has largely dropped out of sight and out of mind—the famous Excalibur Technologies which reinvented itself as Convera. Anyone remember ConQuest Software. That was absorbed into Convera and made maintain word lists and controlled vocabularies an interesting task.
You can access the Convera profile at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles. If you want to argue about one of the comments in this draft profile, use the comments section to this blog post.
The profiles will not be updated or maintained. I am providing the information because some students may find the explanations, diagrams, and comments of interest. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. If you want to use this for commercial purposes, please, contact me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Remember. I am almost 70 years old and some of the final versions of these profiles commanded hefty fees. Enjoy the tales of search systems that sometimes work okay and sometimes don’t work.
Stephen E Arnold, October 9, 2013
What Is Lightbound, Formerly iQuest Analytics?
February 21, 2012
iQuest Analytics was founded in 2005 by Peter Gloor, who continues as president and chief science officer, to innovate and deliver world class and best of breed search technology solutions that solve critical knowledge issues around speed, relevance, and efficiency. The company, we believe, is now Lightbound.
Its iQuest Software Suite, an integrated software suite that combines social network analysis, auto-categorization with text extraction technologies to analyze unstructured data, was named a KMWorld Trend-Setting Product in 2009.
iQuest Discovery is the company’s enterprise search, research, and discovery (eSRD) solution that utilizes a technology architecture based on combined proprietary dynamic data structure innovations, natural language processing, and “parts of speech” to deliver optimized, efficient and relevant search results. This combination enables high-speed performance and lower cost of ownership and allows researchers to retrieve results that are both intuitive and non-intuitive. iQuest is able to analyze unrelated collections of documents to automatically surface patterns and associations by clustering previously unconnected documents, blogs, RSS feeds, email and other unstructured data. It employs unique Social Network Analysis algorithms combined with token and link extraction to find hidden relationships and mission-critical undiscovered information by mining unstructured data from large document stores, the Web, email logs, phone archives, message boards, blogs and enterprise intranets.
By developing a solution that rapidly identifies relationships between previously unconnected data, iQuest and partner SGI have made it possible for the intelligence community to flag in near real time anomalous behavior that bears scrutiny as a possible danger to national security.
iQuest is the leading provider of eSRD software for the life sciences, intelligence, law enforcement, regulatory, legal, and research and development industries.
Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
iQuest, Now Lightbound
February 15, 2012
iQuest is now Lightbound. So what’s a “lightbound”?
Lightbound appears to be the former iQuest Analytics, which was founded in 2005 by Peter Gloor, who continues as president and chief science officer, to innovate and deliver world class and best of breed search technology solutions that solve critical knowledge issues around speed, relevance, and efficiency. Its iQuest Software Suite, an integrated software suite that combines social network analysis, auto-categorization with text extraction technologies to analyze unstructured data, was named a KMWorld Trend-Setting Product in 2009.
iQuest Discovery is the company’s enterprise search, research, and discovery (eSRD) solution that utilizes a technology architecture based on combined proprietary dynamic data structure innovations, natural language processing, and “parts of speech” to deliver optimized, efficient and relevant search results. This combination enables high-speed performance and lower cost of ownership and allows researchers to retrieve results that are both intuitive and non-intuitive.
iQuest is able to analyze unrelated collections of documents to automatically surface patterns and associations by clustering previously unconnected documents, blogs, RSS feeds, email and other unstructured data. It employs unique Social Network Analysis algorithms combined with token and link extraction to find hidden relationships and mission-critical undiscovered information by mining unstructured data from large document stores, the Web, email logs, phone archives, message boards, blogs and enterprise intranets.
By developing a solution that rapidly identifies relationships between previously unconnected data, iQuest and partner SGI have made it possible for the intelligence community to flag in near real time anomalous behavior that bears scrutiny as a possible danger to national security.
iQuest is the leading provider of eSRD software for the life sciences, intelligence, law enforcement, regulatory, legal, and research and development industries.
Stephen E Arnold, February 15, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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.
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
Expert System Italy
February 9, 2012
In 1989, Marco Varone, along with Stefano Spaggiari and Paolo Lombardi, founded Expert System Italy. The three wanted to develop semantic software to extract knowledge from text by replicating human processes. Varone is the father of the company’s Cogito technology.
Unlike traditional technologies based on keyword and statistics that can only guess the content of a text, Cogito reads and interprets knowledge trapped in unstructured text, finding hidden relationships, trends, and events. It relies on deep linguistic analysis and semantic disambiguation of text to ensure a complete understanding of a text. The technology can be used on files, e-mails, articles, reports, and Web pages.
After developing Cogito, Expert System partnered with Microsoft and integrated the linguistic and semantic technologies into Microsoft Office. The Cogito Categorizer is also integrated to the SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePointby the SharePartXXL Cogito Connector. In April 2011, the company was awarded a US patent for the Cogito semantic platform.
Products include Cogito Semantic Search, Cogito semantic Advertiser, and Cogito Answers, and Cogito Intelligence Platform. Expert System positions Cogito Semantic Advertiser as an alternative to Google’s AdSense search keyword ad management tool. The company applies semantic technologies to its contextual ad formula, discerning greater meaning from the text in an article to provide more relevant ads. Cogito Answers can be used to improve customer service, combining semantic analysis of sentiment and customer satisfaction monitoring with advanced natural language customer interaction features.
Profitable from the start and with recent growth at a compound annual growth rate of 50%, Expert System has a client list that encompasses a variety of industries. Customers include Vodafone, Eni Group, Pirelli, Telecom Italia, the Italian Ministry of Defense, RIM and CVS Pharmacy. Competitors are Google, Cisco, Flurry, Nuance Communications, and RAMP. Expert System has a strong following in the mobile search space.
Rita Safranek, February 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
OpenCalais: From the Innovators at Thomson Reuters
January 27, 2012
Thomson Reuters is now testing a new print publication called Reuters at the World Economic Forum. Before the firm, returned to print, Thomson Reuters was probing automated tagging.
Founded in 1998, ClearForest was previously an independent software start-up. It was acquired by Reuters in 2007 and is now part of the Markets division of Thomson Reuters. OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters, based on ClearForest technology, to support the interoperability of content across the digital landscape.
OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial settings but can only be used on public content. It can process up to 50,000 documents per day (blog posts, news stories, Web pages, etc.) free of charge. For users needing to process more than that, there is Calais Professional. While it does not keep a copy of the content, it does keep a copy of the metadata it extracts. Offering a de-facto standard for making content interoperable in a fashion that complies with Semantic Web standards ultimately benefits Thomson Reuters, which is then able to track themes, memes and trends on the Web and to potentially do things like link to relevant content that helps provide context to its readers, customers and other constituents.
After releasing a couple of major upgrades – in particular the incorporation of a whole Linked Data ecosystem underneath OpenCalais for companies, geographies, products and a few other things – with little or no adoption and no fundamentally new capabilities being built, the OpenCalais team, headed by Tom Tague, decided to slow down development and let the market for semantic extraction mature. Thomson Reuters believes that there are massive opportunities for OpenCalais in the areas of news, its integration with social media and its utilization as a massive repository of knowledge.
OpenCalais’ early adopters include CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, Slate, Al Jazeera, “The New Republic,” the White House and more. Customers include: Kodak, Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical, NASD, EDS, Boeing, US Dept. Air Force, Reuters, Dow Jones, Thomson Financial. Competitors include Eqentia and Evri. . (I would not include Concept Searching or Ontoprise in this short list due to exogenous complexity factors.)
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Intellisophic: Formerly Indraweb
January 26, 2012
Founded in 1999 as Indraweb and changing its name in 2055, Intellisophic, Inc., is a privately-funded technology company that is the world’s largest provider of taxonomic content. Its technology, originating from the work of founders Henry Kon, PhD., George Burch, and Michael Hoey, is based on the premise that concepts within unstructured information can be systematically derived by leveraging the trusted taxonomies of the reference book community. Within this core idea, Intellisophic developed and patented the Orthogonal Corpus Indexing algorithm for extracting and using taxonomies from reference and education books.
During a stint as principal investigator for MIT’s Context Interchange, CTO Kon researched and implemented methodologies for enterprise integration of structured and semi-structured data over independently managed and disparate schema databases. He researched, designed, and prototyped integration engines for distributed multi-database query and caching over heterogeneous, distributed, and partially connected databases. As a member of MIT’s Composite Information Systems Laboratory, Kon published on multi-database integration engines and the use of ontology for bridging database schema. With Intellisophic, he has pioneered innovation in the conceptual management of unstructured information and in the integration of structured, semi-structured and unstructured content.
Intellisophic content is machine-developed, leveraging knowledge from respected referenceworks. The taxonomies are unbounded by subject coverage and are cost-effective to create. The taxonomy library covers several million topic areas defined by hundreds of millions of terms. In addition to taxonomic content, the company offers intelligent solutions, such as enterprise search and retrieval, business intelligence, categorization and classification, compliance management, portal infrastructure, social networking, content and knowledge management, electronic discovery, data warehousing, and government intelligence.
Its strategic alliance partners include Mark Logic, DataLever, SchemaLogic, DFI International, and Mosaic, Inc. Competitors Sandpiper, Intellidimension, and HighFleet. The depth and breadth of Intellisophic’s taxonomies, along with its support of the leading text mining, search, and categorization applications, make it a good solution for many industries. (I would not include Concept Searching or Ontoprise in this short list due to exogenous complexity factors.)
Stephen E Arnold, January 26, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Mondeca: How Smart Is Your Content?
January 25, 2012
Here in Harrod’s Creek, we and our content are not too smart. Mondeca believes it can change this hapless condition.
Founded in 1999 by Jean Delahousse and others, Mondeca asserts that it is the leading European provider of technology for the management of advanced knowledge structures: ontologies, thesauri, taxonomies, terminologies, metadata repositories, knowledge bases, and Linked Open Data.
Based in Paris, France, the company has been financed by its founders, as well as investment funds Trinova and Banque Populaire. Before starting Mondeca, Delahousse worked for Andersen Consulting, Paris Stock Exchange and Diagram, a publisher of financial software. With expertise in semantic web, ontologies, and content management, he has experience in the design and launch of large software applications, as well as in implementation of semantic technologies for large international clients.
Mondeca’s products help enterprises to integrate and interlink heterogeneous information by mapping it to explicit knowledge references and improve the way information is retrieved, analyzed, and reused by producing consistent, precise, and relevant metadata as well as supplying the relevant context. Mondeca’s technology is at the core of the Semantic Enterprise Information Architecture that allows to interconnect people and resources as well as to extract the most value from information.
Its products include Content Annotation Manager, a platform for building and managing customized workflows for semantic annotation of content that coordinates content analysis, data mapping, human validation, and knowledge enrichment components; and Intelligent Topic Manager, which supports the management of complex knowledge structures throughout their lifecycle, from authoring to delivery and can be either used independently to store and manage complex domain-specific knowledge structures, or as a service that enhances enterprise search, knowledge discovery, and text mining solutions.
Mondeca has also built its credibility in the Semantic Web space as a key contributor to widely-used international standards: OWL, RDF, SKOS, ISO 25964, and Topic Maps. Clients include Hachette Filipacchi, the World Tourism Organization, and Thomson Scientific. Competitors include Layer2 and Wordmap.
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
