Xerox Factspotter: Thingfinder’s Second Cousin
April 20, 2008
A long time ago in a research park far, far away, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) developed text processing systems. Xerox PARC spun out a bundle of this content processing technology as Inxight Software. For about a decade, Inxight chugged along, winning accolades from the spookeratti in Washington, DC’s intelligence community. Business Objects, a disrupter of the business intelligence space, bought Inxight Software. The deal rippled the fabric of the likes of SAS Institute, a company licening Inxight’s technology for its data mining systems. Then SAP bought business objects. Along the way, start ups like PowerSet used some of Xerox’s technology to build a whizzy search start up.
Amidst this slow flowing river of deals, Xerox is back. This time “the document company” has Factspotter. Now Factspotter, like most search and text processing systems, is not newly-sprung from Xerox’s idea hathchery in Grenoble, France. The research team at XRCE, an forgettable acronym for Xerox Research Centre Europe.
I learned about Factspotter in early 2007. I dug through my files and unearthed this description of the invention from the Xerox news release:
Unlike traditional enterprise search tools, FactSpotter looks not only for the keywords contained in a query but also the context of the document those words contain. For example, if searching for documents that reference Angelina Jolie, FactSpotter will also return results where the pronoun “she” is used instead of Jolie’s full name. The “smart” search engine can comb through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.
I haven’t been tracking Xerox’s “inventions” or its document processing business until the IBM InfoPrint entity popped into being in 2007. Then in January 2008, Hewlett Packard paid $1.2 billion for the Exstream Software operation in Lexington, Kentucky. When these document processing developments took place, I wondered what had happened to Xerox, “the document company”. After that thought, Xerox drifted off my radar–until today, April 12.
Someone emailed me a snippet of text from IT Reseller. The key points, which I have edited for easier readability,are:
[Factspotter’s] novel interface means users can express their queries naturally instead of forcing them to adapt their questions to the logic of computers. Traditional systems, on the other hand, split a query into isolated words and return only documents that contain exactly those words in exactly that order, And [Factspotter] takes into account the context of the entire document instead of just a cluster of nearby words. And [Factspotter] introduces the concept of “relation,” searching within and across sentences and paragraphs. It recognizes abstract concepts, like “people” or “building,” and will retrieve all the words that fit within that category.
Xerox’s marketing mavens were dead on in 2007. The only issue is that I have is that it’s on the Xerox Web site, but not anywhere else. If you know the fate of Thingfinder’s second cousin, write me at seaky2000 @ yahoo.com.
Stephen Arnold, April 20, 2008
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Thingfinder’s first cousin is still out there, as well.
Temis’ text mining software is derived from XRCE’s Xelda product, following a period of licensing from Xerox, and Temis’ purchase of the IP and hiring the Xelda development team.