Nstein in the News
October 11, 2010
I had a couple of comments about my not mentioning Nstein, now a unit of OpenText. Nstein has been an interesting company or unit of a bigger enterprise. Last year, one of Nstein’s executives set up a meeting with me and then did not show up. I pinged the fellow and learned that his plans had changed. Since then, my plans for covering Nstein changed as well. Seemed only fair.
To assuage the aggrieved reader, I took a quick look at the content sucked into my Overflight system about Nstein. One of the more interesting items appeared in a publication for which I write a for-fee column. I don’t cover search in that publication, but Archana Venkatraman wrote “Semantic Content Analytics Can Resolve Digital Information Problems.” I was surprised because a picture of me and links to my recent write ups about SAP appeared in the border for the Web version of Mr. Venkatraman’s article. I was flattered, but I was confused about the premise of the article; to wit, analytics resolving digital information problems. I think of analytics as causing problems, particularly with regard to the methods used to generate output. Data type and source, privacy, and latency – these topics cross the goose’s mind when he thinks about content analytics.
With regard to Nstein, the passage that caught my attention was information which is attributed, I assume, to an OpenText Nstein executive, Lubor Ptacek, vice president, product marketing:
Semantic Navigation first collects content through a crawling process. Then the content is automatically analyzed and tagged with relevant and insightful entities, topics, summaries and sentiments – the key to providing an engaging online experience. Next, content is served to users through intuitive navigation widgets that encourage audiences to discover the depth of available information or share it on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. From there, it supports placement of product and service offerings or advertising to convert page views into sales.Ptacek gives the example of a medical information professional is searching for the name of a disease, content analytics technology can provide him additional information such as the side effects of the illness the drugs used in the past and so on. “And this logic can be applied to other industries as well.” The solution comes after Open Text acquired Nstein Technologies, a content analytics company, six months ago. It acquired Nstein at a time when analysts were suggesting that such e-discovery solutions could provide sophisticated search and content navigation options that info pros are seeking.
I am hearing similar explanations of functionality from a number of companies. These include “sentiment specialists” like Attensity and Lexalytics and from certain mashup vendors such as Digital Reasoning and Kapow Technologies. I have heard the leaders in enterprise search like Autonomy and Exalead reference similar functions. I could toss in IBM, Google, and Microsoft, but I think you get the idea. Quite a few search vendors are morphing into solutions.
If you want more information about OpenText / Nstein, navigate to www.opentext.com. I would also suggest a look at the other vendors making similar assertions. I may have to start covering this new segment of search. Perhaps it warrants a separate Web log?
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2010
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