Enhanced Document Filters from dtSearch
August 21, 2012
We learn that dtSearch is beta testing its product line’s version 7.70 from Technology Magazine in “Beta Enhances dtSearch Document Filters to Display Highlighted.” The press release tells us:
“dtSearch Corp., a leading supplier of enterprise and developer text retrieval along with document filters, announces beta testing of Version 7.70 of the dtSearch product line. The new version adds multiple improvements to the document filters spanning the dtSearch product line. For customers in need of data parsing, conversion and extraction only, the dtSearch Engine APIs (native 64-bit/32-bit, Win/Linux C++, Java and .NET through 4.x) also make the document filters available for separate OEM licensing.”
Besides the dtSearch Engine, available for Windows and .NET or for Linux, the new release also applies to dtSearch Web with Spider, dtSearch Network with Spider, dtSearch Publish, and dtSearch Desktop with Spider.
Users of the new version will find that it supports a wide array of data types, and that image support has been added to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, RTF, and email files. Enhancements have also been made to the multi-level nested configurations, including a new “object extraction” API. The write up also emphasizes the following features: built-in spider functionality; a terabyte indexer; assorted search options; and international language support. See the press release for more details.
Incorporated in Virginia in 1991, dtSearch began its text retrieval R&D back in 1988. Business and government organizations in over 70 countries rely on its wide product line to manage a myriad of data related tasks.
Cynthia Murrell, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
3D Modeling Aimed at SMEs Growing in Popularity
August 21, 2012
For manufacturers reducing the time of a product from conception to production is one of the top priorities. Another top priority is streamlining processes so that waste and duplication is kept to a minimum. Siemens, one of the leaders in PLM research and development, has recently released RobotExpert as described in the article, “Siemens PLM Has ‘Out of the Box’ Solution for Robotic Simulation and Programming”, on Eureka Magazine.
The article explains how RobotExpert can help small and midsized enterprises (SME):
“Featuring an intuitive 3D environment, RobotExpert combines the ability to optimise robotic paths and improve cycle times with the option to simulate virtual mockups of complete manufacturing cells and systems. It provides an offline programming and simulation tool which helps to minimise downtime by allowing the majority of the programming work to be done virtually while optimising the programme to reduce the cycle time and increase throughput.”
Many PLM providers are realizing the value of 3D capabilities and the demand manufacturers have for such applications. Recently PLM provider, Inforbix, announced it is developing 3D capabilities on its Website:
“Inforbix has been conducting experiments with a few vendors offering 3D viewing. Our goal is to offer our users the option to view product data in 3D when using Inforbix apps.”
Exciting innovations such as Siemens RobotExpert and Inforbix’s upcoming 3D application are ideal for SMEs that traditionally have not had access due to high costs which is changing, however, with new technology.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Another View of TAR
August 21, 2012
One judge’s endorsement of Technology Assisted Review (TAR) has set a precedent and has stirred up the eDiscovery community. The eDiscovery and Information Management blog tackles the topic in “Technology Assisted Review, Concept Search and Predictive Coding: The Limitations and Risks.”
TAR is also variously called Machine Assisted Review, Computer Assisted Review, Predictive Coding, Concept Search, and Meaning-based computing. It seems that US federal judge Andrew J. Peck ordered parties in a recent case to adopt an eDiscovery protocol, including the use of TAR as practiced by Recommind’s Axcelerate. The other side filed a complaint, and now the debate rages on.
The blog post aims to bring some perspective to the issue. While it praises text mining and machine learning, the author warns that folks should understand what predictive coding can and cannot do. The write up notes that AI techniques:
“. . . are based on solid mathematical and statistical frameworks in combination with common-sense or biology-inspired heuristics. In the case of text-mining, there is an extra complication: the content of textual documents has to be translated, so to speak, into numbers (probabilities, mathematical notions such as vectors, etc.) that machine learning algorithms can interpret. The choices that are made during this translation can highly influence the results of the machine learning algorithms.
“For instance, the ‘bag-of-words’ approach used by some products has several limitations that may result in having completely different documents ending up in the exact same vector for machine learning and having documents with the same meaning ending up as completely different vectors.”
The post points to additional complications. For example, multi-lingual documents can cause difficulties. Also, different documents may use different language to describe the same things, or their language can be ambiguous. Furthermore, the process of setting up classifiers can be time-consuming and challenging; if not implemented conscientiously the results will not be defensible in court.
See the article for more details. The post ends by noting there are other ways to automatically classify documents, and that in many cases those options will produce results that are more defensible and more manageable than those produced by TAR.
Cynthia Murrell, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Pirate Bay Damages May Not Be Going to Help Musicians
August 21, 2012
If this is true, we are horrified—imagine, improper actions from traditional music publishers! TechEYE.net charges, “Big Content Lied About Helping Artists.” The Swedish lawsuit against torrent download site Pirate Bay, not surprisingly, found the site guilty of copyright violations. The music labels insist they have the artists’ needs at heart when pursuing such litigation—isn’t that sweet? It would be, if it were true. The write up states:
“According to TorrentFreak, it turns out that none of the damages will actually go to any artists. All the cash has been allocated to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) to fund new anti-piracy campaigns.
“Part of the sentence were damages that have to be paid to various entertainment industry companies. EMI Music, Universal Music, Sony Music and other labels. Of that, €550,000 was supposed to compensate artists and rights holders for the losses they suffered. Unfortunately for the artists, the court money goes to the IFPI, which has decided to pocket it.”
Of course, the whole issue is academic; no one can find any Pirate Bay assets in Sweden, and the Swedish enforcement agency is not allowed to hunt for any outside of that country. Still, it is the principle of the thing. Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde asserts that, as far as he knows, no money awarded in any lawsuit brought by recording industry reps IFPI or RIAA has ever gone to artists.
So. . . who are we trying to protect here?
Cynthia Murrell, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Not All Subscribe to Big Data Hype
August 21, 2012
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that big data is everyone’s next big thing, right? Not so fast. Computerworld enlightens us, declaring that “Most Firms Have No Big Data Plans, Survey Finds. ” Writer Lucas Mearian points to the latest iteration of an annual survey from market-research outfit TheInfoPro. Each year, its Technology Heat Index Survey polls hundreds of IT pros about their plans. This year’s results show that 56% of the 255 respondents see no big data analytics in their futures. The write up reports:
“Survey respondents with no plans to roll out Hadoop or other big data analytics software said doing so requires a specific business case, and in most instances they didn’t see a need for it, according to Marco Coulter, managing director of TheInfoPro’s Cloud Computing Practice. . . .
“Coulter said those companies rolling out big data analytics tend to be in the financial services and healthcare arena, where great amounts of data can be boiled down to reveal trends and best practices.”
You mean people are actually examining their needs before jumping on a bandwagon? Imagine that.
The article shares several more survey findings; check it out for full details. One example—server virtualization was found (again) to be considered the leading driver of capacity growth; 67% of those surveyed revealed that 80% -100% of their production servers connect to a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN). The survey also found a leap in organizations planning to deploy solid state drive (SSD) technology, from just 7% last year to 37% this time around.
Not surprisingly, many respondents are having to make due with tightening budgets. Some things are nigh universal, I suppose.
Cynthia Murrell, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP Plans to Dominate the Cloud
August 21, 2012
Think Amazon has the cloud locked up? Or that, perhaps, Google or IBM is destined to lead this field? InfoWorld presents another view in “HP’s Cloud Guy: Why We’re the Enterprise Cloud.” Wait, HP has a Cloud Guy?
Yes, it does, and his name is Biri Singh. Singh, who used to be VP of cloud computing at IBM, hopes to combine HP’s IaaS (infrastructure as a service) with integrated, private HP clouds. He and his team are basing the initiative on the open source cloud OS OpenStack. Writer Eric Knorr interviewed Singh and serves up part of the conversation in this article. It is a long read, so check it out yourself for all the details.
The part that interests me—who HP expects will use their cloudy solutions. Singh states:
“We’re going after the enterprise developer, where there are a bunch of expectations about which production workloads are going to end up on the public cloud. We happen to think there will be tens of thousands use cases that are ultimately going to be driven by the need for a secure, SLA-driven, enterprise-class quality of service. Our focus is the enterprise developer, but also IT ops.
“For production workloads enterprises may consider running, they want the scale, they want the advantage of cost efficiencies. They want the security. But most importantly, they want a vendor who understands what they’re about, who they’ve done business with, who understands the need for innovative services yet can balance out SLA, security, and customer service — and who provides choices in terms of being an open architecture, partnering with other stacks and not locking in customers.”
Singh asserts that some of HP’s competitors, including Amazon Web Services, have been shortsighted. Their approach, he says, is the outdated “stand up a bunch of VMs and see what happens.” Developers and businesses are looking for more—better tools, modern languages and frameworks, and tight security. HP is ready to address their needs like no one else can, he pledges.
We’ll see.
Cynthia Murrell, August 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories August 10 to August 16
August 20, 2012
This week the IntelTrax blog published some excellent articles on data analytics and search technologies.
One of the most notable analytics developers for Web sites is the search giant Google. “eGoogle Analytics Is No Longer the Only Game in Town” discusses some other options for those companies that are not satisfied with what Google is offering.
The article explains:
“If you operate your own website, analytic software can be crucial in order to track exactly how well your site is doing. Without this software, you can do whatever you want with your site, but you will never know if it is getting more visitors, aside from the amount of comments. When you look at the possible options you have for analytic software, the most popular choice is Google Analytics. However, if you’re not a fan of Google or its Analytics package, there’s no need to fear. There are still a handful of options for you to try out.”
Another article of note discusses the recent dramatic increase of unstructured data in almost every industry. “Growth of Text Analytics in Response to Unstructured Data” discusses the fact that there has also been an explosion of data analytics solution to make sense of all this new data.
When discussing some great solutions available, the article states:
“The Text Analytics market is rapidly consolidating with numerous mergers and acquisitions over the past year. Oracle purchased Endeca for its technology to mash up unstructured data from many different data sources. HP acquired similar technology from Autonomy. IBM picked up Vivisimo and Lexmark for their rich search features. Popularity of Big Data is driving huge interest in the area of text analytics, and that interest is causing the technology to evolve quickly. Text analytics techniques, for example, are becoming increasingly richer and more sophisticated in the information and insight which they can provide.”
While there are a lot of amazing data analytics solutions on the market, many companies are also feeling the effects of a downtrodden economy, so choosing an affordable solution is a very important part of their decision making process. “CFOs Demand a Reduction in Costs and Increase in Competitive Edge” argues that companies are utilizing data analytics solutions as a way to cut costs and create new growth opportunities.
Here are some qualities that companies in New Zealand and Australia are looking for in their products:
“As a discrete process, like CRM, corporate performance management is particularly well suited to a cloud delivery model. It provides organizations greater flexibility, lower capital costs and fast implementations that take weeks rather than six plus months. The end result is customers fast-track uncovering business opportunity. We’re excited about partnering with Host Analytics as it provides our clients a unique value proposition at a time when CFOs and CIOs are telling us that their number one priority is to reduce costs and gain competitive advantage with business analytics.”
The three articles that I have highlighted drive the point home that companies, regardless of their industry, are looking for text analytics solutions that will efficiently make the most of their limited resources and time. Digital Reasoning is a relatively young provider that understand the unique needs of small and midsized companies and offer their Synthesys platform as a solution that provides all the necessary data crunching tools and apps needed for most industries.
Jasmine Ashton, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Thake Discusses Business Opportunities with SharePoint 2013 Marketplace
August 20, 2012
In “Why We Need a SharePoint 2013 Marketplace,” Jeremy Thake shares his thoughts on the opportunities that lie in the new SharePoint app home. In looking back at the history of marketplaces, Thake credits Apple iOS marketplace as the best example where Microsoft has a number of marketplaces, but they do not share the same platform.
He adds this about potential Web parts:
There is already an app for World Clock and Weather app. I expect a Stock Ticker app to be close behind this also. The big limitations with making web parts available this way is that there is no API to automatically add a web part to the parent site collection homepage at the moment. The metro tiles on the site home pages can’t be manipulated by the apps to add the web part there.
Thake also comments on the possibilities of community involvement, financial rewards, and the light integration hoped for the Marketplace. The new feature for SharePoint is exciting as it may greatly enhance work processes and collaboration. But we also know there are gaps in an out of the box SharePoint deployment. Thake sees some blockers with the expected Web part functionality.
Here you can read about the smooth integration of Fabasoft Mindbreeze with rich Web part capability:
It enables all information that is connected to Mindbreeze to be displayed in Microsoft SharePoint. This takes place smoothly via Web Parts. In this way not only information contained within Microsoft SharePoint, but also all other information that is available within the respective company, can be consolidated within one ‘platform.’ Mindbreeze therefore delivers real additional value to Microsoft SharePoint in the form of an add-on.
Philip West, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Site Search Advice from Econsultancy
August 20, 2012
Econsultancy has some good advice for online retailers in “Site Search Results Pages: Examples and Best Practices.” It is an interesting presentation of how to make search results pages sell. Blogger Graham Charlton introduces the topic:
“Once users have found the search box and entered their product query, the most important aspect is the speed and accuracy of the search results.
“There is a lot that retailers can do on search results pages to enhance the user experience and make the route from search to purchase as smooth as possible.
“Here are some examples, good and bad, from retailers, as well as some tips to improve the user experience.”
The first two pieces of advice demonstrate the common-sense posture behind the post: results pages should load quickly, and the results should be accurate. Other good suggestions include: use a spell checker, order results by relevancy, and include product information on the results page. Charlton elaborates on each suggestion, and screenshots from real retail sites help illustrate his points. Much of this could be considered obvious, but at the least it makes for a good checklist.
Econsultancy is a membership-based digital marketing community that provides a form for ecommerce pros. The company also creates reports, offers training services, and performs marketing experiments.
Cynthia Murrell, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PLM Market Report Looks Optimistically to Future
August 20, 2012
Over the course of 2012 CIMdata has released and will be releasing five components of the CIMdata PLM Market Analysis Report Series on the state of PLM worldwide. The fourth report was recently released and the results were promising according to the TenLinks article, “CIMdata Publishes 4th of 5 Parts of PLM Market Report”.
The article quoted CIMdata’s Director of Research, Stan Przybylinski, as saying,
“While the global economy sputtered, the PLM economy grew faster in 2011 than in 2010, which was a very good year. Most segments of the market that CIMdata tracks saw high double digit growth, with very strong license sales. Given that new license sales are often precursors to more software and services investment, this is a strong indicator that 2012 could be another solid year for PLM solution and services providers. Strong growth continued in industries with long-time PLM investments, such as automotive, high-tech and fabrication and assembly (F&A). Some other small markets, like shipbuilding and infrastructure also saw increased spending.”
For those in the PLM industry these results were not shocking at all. Several PLM providers have completed highly successful fund raising campaigns and some innovative, new products have been released onto the market over the last year or so. Some of the most notable providers are CIMdata, Inforbix, Dassault and PTC. If the predictions of the PLM Market Analysis Report are accurate we expect big things from these providers in the years to come.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
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