Sinequa bottles up Pernod Ricard
January 26, 2012
Leading global beverage distributor and producer Pernot Ricard has selected Sinequa to handle its growing data management needs, informs “Pernod Ricard Uses Sinequa to Offer All Its Employees Unified Access to Group Information” at Minesto.
Each separate division of Pernod Ricard, and there are many, has its own intra- or extra- net, and many also have their own Web sites. The press release asserts,
Sinequa was chosen for its ability to implement a solution offering multilingual natural language search and ability to connect quickly with all sources of documents. Indexing, classification and organization of documents of any type and any size has facilitated access for users and administrators with information present in multiple intranets and extranets.
In the future, Pernod Ricard intends to integrate Sinequa tools into its business applications. Sounds like they are happy with their choice.
Pernot Ricard is a global behemoth, producing and distributing many of the top inebriants, like Absolut vodka, Glenlivet scotch whisky, Beefeater gin. . . the list goes on and on. See here for their US page.
Sinequa’s 25 years in the semantics business uniquely equips them for such large-scale projects. In fact, their world-wide customer base includes a number of huge private and public organizations. The company prides itself on crafting intuitive solutions.
Cynthia Murrell, January 26, 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
MegaSearch: Looking for Excitement?
January 19, 2012
Short honk: Search systems for underground or dark net content such as credit card numbers come and go. If you are interested in this particular type of search excitement, you will want to read “‘MegaSearch’ Aims to Index Fraud Site Wares.” The service points and does not store certain information such as credit card information. We learned:
MegaSearch said that when his site first launched at the end of 2011 and began indexing the five card shops he’s now tracking, those shops had some 360,000 compromised accounts for sale, collectively. Since then, those shops have moved more than 200,000 cards. The search engine currently has indexed 352,000 stolen account numbers that are for sale right now in the underground.
For more information, see “Underground Credit Card Store Operators Aggregate Their Stolen Data.” The link, which may be blocked by certain systems, is MegaSearch.cc. Explore but understand the risks.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Temis, Spammy PR, and Quite Silly Assertions
January 11, 2012
I am working on a project related to semantics. The idea is, according to that almost always reliable Wikipedia resource is:
the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata.
Years ago I studied at Duquesne University, a fascinating blend of Jesuit obsession, basketball, and phenomenological existentialism. If you are not familiar with this darned exciting branch of philosophy, you can dig into Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint by Franz Brentano or grind through Carl Stumpf’s The Psychological Origins of Space Perception, or just grab the Classic Comic Book from your local baseball card dealer. (My hunch is that many public relations professionals feel more comfortable with the Classic approach, not the primary texts of philosophers who focus on how ephemera and baloney affect one’s perception of reality one’s actions create.)
But my personal touchstone is Edmund Husserl’s body of work. To get the scoop on Lebenswelt (a universe of what is self-evident), you will want to skip the early work and go directly to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. For sure, PR spam is what I would call self evident because it exists, was created by a human (possibly unaware that actions define reality), to achieve an outcome which is hooked to the individual’s identify.
Why mention the crisis of European thought? Well, I received “American Society for Microbiology Teams Up With TEMIS to Strengthen Access to Content” in this morning’s email (January 10, 2012). I noted that the document was attributed to an individual identified as Martine Fallon. I asked to be removed from the spam email list that dumps silly news releases about Temis into my system. I considered that Martine Fallon may be a ruse like Betty Crocker. Real or fictional, I am certain she or one of her colleagues, probably schooled in an esoteric discipline such as modern dance, agronomy, and public relations are familiar with the philosophical musings of Jean Genet.
You can get a copy of Born to Lose at this link.
I recall M. Genet’s observation:
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
Temis, a European company in the dicey semantic game, surely appreciates the delicious irony of explaining a license deal as a “team”. The notion of strengthening access to content is another semantic bon mot. The problem is that the argument does not satisfy my existential quest for factual information; for example, look at the words and bound phrases in bold:
Temis, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise, today announced it has signed a license and services agreement with the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the oldest and largest life science membership organization in the world.
Do tell. Leading? Semantic content enrichment. What’s that?
The “leading” word is interesting but it lacks the substance of verifiable fact. Well, there’s more to the news story and the Temis pitch. Temis speaks for its client, asserting:
To serve its 40,000 members better, ASM is completely revamping its online content offering, and aggregating at a new site all of its authoritative content, including ASM’s journal titles dating back to 1916, a rapidly expanding image library, 240 book titles, its news magazine Microbe, and eventually abstracts of meetings and educational publications.
I navigated to the ASM Web site, did some poking around, and learned that ASM is rolling in dough. You can verify the outfit’s financial status at this page. But the numbers and charts allowed me to see that ASM has increasing assets, which is good. However, this chart suggests that since 2008, revenue has been heading south.
Source: http://www.faqs.org/tax-exempt/DC/American-Society-For-Microbiology.html
In my limited experience in rural Kentucky, not-for-profits embrace technology for one of three reasons. Let me list them and see if we can figure out what causes the estimable American Society for Microbiology.
Search Engine Optimization Billing
January 7, 2012
I saw a graphic which purports to answer the question, “How Much Does SEO Cost?” The guts of the write up is more along the lines of how a client pays for the allegedly high-value, must-have ministrations of SEO experts. Here’s an example:
cost-per-project is the most common pricing model and is offered by 70% of the agencies and consultancies surveyed. A monthly retainer was the second most common cost model offered (60%), followed by hourly rates at 55%.
The big summary of data explains what services the alleged experts offer the clients who pay. The bulk of the work appears to be involved in making recommendations and suggesting key words. Okay, librarians, are you on alert. SEO experts are recommending key words. I wonder if home economics majors, those skilled in political science, and various unemployed high school teachers are trained in indexing? MBAs? Hey, MBAs are born able to manage anything. Key words are a piece of cake. Just look at the indexing of Lehman Brothers’ and BearStearns’ content.
But the big factoid in the write up is the Monthly retainer section. One learns that the fees are in what is “buy a Toyota Camry” range; that is, hundreds a month to $2,501 to $5,000 a month range. The use of blue bars without “real” numbers makes this observation suspect, but I concluded that with advisory services and some key word fiddling, a good salesperson could snag six or seven clients a month. Even at $2,000 per month, the enterprising SEO expert can move up to a baby Lexus.
Project pricing is, it appears, mostly in the $1,500 to $7,000 range. My hunch is that projects drag out over several time chunks. The hourly rate section pegs the experts in the $75 to $150 per hour range. Compared to blue chip consulting work or expert witness work, SEO experts are billing at a rate which probably keeps the lights on and maybe makes it possible to enjoy a holiday each year.
The infographic suggests that making a living as an SEO expert is possible, probably not particularly easy. Worth checking out the chart if you are in the SEO game. No information about the productization of the alleged SEO services. That would be interesting to me.
By the way, the “real cost” of SEO is the friction added to the spending of Bing and Google to deal with the craziness, spoofing, and coding horrors the SEO clan visits on the hapless residents of rural Kentucky. Google’s Matt Cutts has a job because of SEO. SEO costs a great deal of money, and when I consider how relevance has become a thing of the past, SEO has consumed more dough than it has generated for those looking for on point information.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SAP: Long and Winding Road for Search
January 5, 2012
In one of the early editions of the Enterprise Search Report, that white elephant of 600 pages containing profiles of more than two dozen vendors, I described TREX, a nifty algorithm for Text Retrieval and Information Extraction. (The link is to the Wikipedia write up, however.) For those of you who are new to search, TREX is not the creature you wished you had as a pet when you were eight years old. The SAP TREX is a natural language processing search and retrieval system which was mostly home grown. Keep in mind that TREX owns the Inxight entity extraction and server technology developed by the adepts at Xerox PARC. I interviewed one of the developers, profiled the system’s approach to content processing, and pointed out that search was a killer in the SAP R/3 environment for three reasons:
- SAP assigns its own spiffy metadata to content objects, storing these in the wild and wonder proprietary R/3 environment
- SAP systems took and probably still take a long time to plan, implement, and impose on the client. My understanding is that the client does not tell SAP how the clients like to work. SAP tells the client how the client will work with the SAP system and method. Nifty for sure.
- SAP systems have struggled with a wide range of performance “opportunities.” The idea is that when something goes slowly, then the client has the “opportunity” to make changes which will speed up the large, IBM-inspired system.
A few years ago, before Endeca became the new billion dollar toy at Oracle, Endeca accepted cash infusions from outfits hooked up with Intel (yep, the company with the vision that its chips could crush any computational problem because they were so darned fast) and SAP’s investment unit (an outfit allegedly looking at ways to give SAP a leg up on the future). After watching Endeca do its recursive indexing and faceting processes, Intel and SAP shifted gears. Endeca, as you know, is now part of Oracle along with TripleHop (clustering and indexing), InQuira (natural language processing from two predecessor companies), and RightNow (also infused with search technology), Artificial Linguistics, PL/SQL’s wonky command driven search, and probably some technologies I either don’t know about or have forgotten due to advancing senility.
Will SAP slip and fall with its information retrieval solutions? A happy quack to the image source http://personalinjuryclaims1.co.uk/fall-claims/
When you want to run search within an SAP environment, many folks just embrace one of the SharePoint solutions, give TREX a go, or license a system which is compatible with some of the SAP processed content. In short, SAP’s approach to search is not much different from IBM’s or Microsoft’s.
The question to consider is, “What’s next for SAP?”
Several observations:
First, SAP has to pump money into TREX to keep the system in step with today’s information demands. With SAP dabbling in open source and focusing on higher margin products and services, TREX is probably not the long haul solution for SAP. Home grown search is too expensive.
Second, SAP continues to poke around open source software. At some point, SAP may follow in the footsteps of the company which inspired SAP in the first place—IBM. Lucene and Solr look like possible options. This is a trend to watch.
Third, SAP buys or ties up with one of the workman-like search vendors. SAP could either sign a deal to use a third party system on some basis or just buy one of the dozens of information retrieval vendors who are looking for a financial white knight. Despite the chatter about search, many search and retrieval companies are gasping for oxygen. SAP may have a tank and a breathing mask.
What’s my view? Well, since I am a mercenary goose, I don’t have an official opinion. I do find it fascinating that SAP has not moved aggressively to the Lucene Solr solution. So for now, I am going out of town and will wait until my Overflight service provides some solid data about SAP’s next move.
Hopefully it will be more artfully crafted than SAP’s pricing and customer service activities in the last two or three years.
January 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Predicting Failure: Pot Calls Kettle Black and Blue
January 2, 2012
Fascinating is traditional media’s ability to attack a hopelessly confused big corporation for a failure. The failure documented by the New York Times was Hewlett Packard’s immolation of its mobile strategy. The outfit doing the criticizing—what I call the pot calling the kettle gray lady black and blue—is the New York Times. Ah, irony.
Which is more flawed? The management of HP or the management of the New York Times. Let me try to remember. The New York Times lost its top manager and its head of digital stuff. The home delivery rate is nudging close to $700 a year. The Safari loophole makes its digital content free. The company has muffed the bunny with its indexing, its About.com property, and just about every financial knob and dial setting available.
HP, on the other hand, has engaged in improper behavior, the CEO revolving door game, the tablet fiasco, and the open sourcing of a $1.0 billion plus investment. HP bought Autonomy for $10 billion, creating a mini cash concern for some Wall Street types.
Sounds like a pretty even game of management
Now to the business at hand: “In Flop of H.P. TouchPad, an Object Lesson for the Tech Sector.” (If the link goes dead, just use Safari. Access to NYT content seems to be “free”. Nifty, eh? What is the New York Times suggesting? For me, the write up is more about the New York Times itself than about Hewlett Packard. Three points:
- HP created a flop due to various management mistakes. Okay, sounds like the NYT’s problem
- HP had a good idea but it “was ahead of its time”. Right. The NYT had a deal with LexisNexis which worked pretty well, but not well enough. So the NYT decided it could go it alone. It was, as the NYT says, “ahead of its time.” No kidding.
- HP faced a problem with newcomers who dominated a market. Check. Same with the NYT and its various digital efforts. Being good at one thing does not mean that one if good at another thing.
My take? The NYT is trying to be just like the Harvard Business Review, adding value to what is not even a news story any longer. Going down this path ignores some of the basics of creating high value business and management analysis. The information is not what makes money. It is the other revenue streams. The NYT will learn as Time and Newsweek have that trying to up one’s intellectual game does not automatically make the money flow or the analysis insightful. Business information is often a loss leader or a way to generate consulting revenue.
The write up does explain how the NYT sees the woes of other companies. That is indeed interesting. I wonder if the NYT team remembers its original online search service. I bet Jeff Pemberton does.
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
January 2012 and a 2009 Meet Up: Spoof or Goof?
January 1, 2012
The idea of accuracy is on my mind. I did a quick look at what our Overflight service “saw” in the last eight hours, and I noticed “SEO Meet Up and Its Future Potential.” The source for the document is Ontosearch which has the subtitle “Ontology Search Engine.” Since I don’t know what an ontology is, I was interested in how I might search such a system.
Get your goof T shirt from Zazzle. Image source: http://www.zazzle.com/ya_dun_goofd_tshirt-235540199656793547
I noted this passage in a write up that seemed to be reporting on a meet up in Mubai, India, in August 2009. Since it is now 2012, the idea that “news” flowing from an event held two years ago caught my attention. Here’s the passage I noted:
Keeping the potential of a SEO analyst in mind and in general the SEO vertical, a SEO meet up was organized in Mumbai on the 1st Aug 2009. Scores of SEO specialists, content experts, web designers etc. met to discuss the changing landscape of the web, and latest trends in the SEO services. This meet up was undoubtedly an eye opener for everybody and they left with a plethora of understanding. They also discussed the future of SEO. The web world has made a transition from the traditional Web 1. to Web 2.. And there are already talks of Web three. in the pipeline. The future is semantic indexing and collaborative development. A excellent SEO must have the flexibility to recognize and implement the nuances of making use of a semantic technology to link different sites and come across a way to promote his own. So adaptability and openness are going to the keys of Web 3.. Agility and continuous improvement would be the hallmark of Web three..
Hmmm. I think this is too sophisticated for an addled goose. Is this a spoof or goof? My view is that this is an example of content which looks as if it were the product of a person who graduated from a junior college. Then again, when an addled goose cannot figure out”agility”, I think we have another example of fancy words and meaning free content. Are Bing and Google fooled? I think so.
A quick review of other posts on the Web site reveal other write ups which baffle. If you are looking for information about a taxonomy, Pandia and ArnoldIT will publish in 2012 a monograph on the subject. No spoof, and we hope that we don’t goof. That’s a useful New Year’s resolution: Write about sources, ideas, and developments which sort of make sense “ontologically”, of course. I think it is time for content to “relevel up”, a phrase used by a political candidate.
But not for the owner of the domain in Timur, Indonesia.
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2012
Trends and Challenges of Enterprise Search Discussed in Online Presentation
December 27, 2011
One of the best ways to stay on top of trends and happenings in the world of enterprise search is to check out some online training opportunities, webinars, talks, and lectures. Many are free, or relatively inexpensive, and can be easily accessed at your convenience. Susan Koch’s recent presentation from the Online Information Conference 2011, “The Landscape of Enterprise Search,” is one of these handy information sources.
Topics covered include challenges in enterprise search, four trends from the industry, and advice for those deploying an enterprise search system. So what are some trends in the world of searching and indexing diverse business information? With consumers driving social network proliferation, it is no surprise integrated social functions make the list. Most other trends revolve around the user experience: easy integrated searching, combining structured and unstructured data, and combining different content types in search results.
The presentation also includes some points on what a buyer should consider when transitioning to enterprise search, like the following:
What specific functions are essential? What kind of content is to be processed? How frequently is the index to be updated? How will the data to be searched grow? How might future search needs be different?
It is important to consider third party solutions when deploying your new system. They often provide an easy solution while easing startup costs. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their suite of products is in line with enterprise search trends, including social media and integrated searching.
In “Informed Decisions: Connect your Enterprise and the Cloud,” Daniel Fallmann explains:
To make swift and informed decisions it is essential to get a fast understanding of the available information and of all relations and people/experts involved. Enterprise Search and especially Unified Information Access allow a perfect symbiosis of (on-premise) enterprise applications with Cloud services and Cloud Apps. With our latest release, the 2011 Winter Release, we have released a brand new feature that empowers the individual user to make use of Cloud services to seamlessly.
Check out Mindbreeze solutions for your enterprise search system.
Philip West, December 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SearchBlox 6.4: Just in Time for the Holidays
December 21, 2011
SearchBlox announces, “SearchBlox Version 6.4 Released.” Important bug fixes make this a must-download for current users. For example, basic search will now work with foreign characters, and the problem indexing some MS Office docs has been overcome. However, the new features are more interesting. We learned from the write up:
SearchBlox can now automatically detect text files on the files system and index them irrespective of their file extensions. . . . You will now be able to use SearchBlox to search across repositories of text files such as source code files and log files.
The filename of the indexed document is now available as a separate tag <filename></filename> in the XML search results
Both additions are helpful, indeed.
SearchBlox is a provider of enterprise search solutions based on Apache Lucene. Over 300 customers in 30 countries use SearchBlox to power their Web site, Intranet and custom search. SearchBlox Software, Inc. was founded in 2003 with the aim to develop commercial search products based on Apache Lucene, which is turning up in solutions from Lucid Imagination to PolySpot.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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