Intel and Its Search Quest: Maana from Heaven
September 26, 2015
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to “Rethinking Enterprise Search for the Big Data Age.” The write up explains that old-school search won’t do the trick in today’s digital content environment.
I learned that the Manna Search and Discovery Platform is built on a modern Hadoop stack that leverages HDFS, the Accumulo graph database, Apache Spark, heaps of Scala code, and a host of various machine learning algorithms for teasing knowledge out of reams of unstructured data.
The write up veers into a swamp I try to avoid. I am not sure what knowledge is, and I have a heck of a time figuring out how data becomes information. The knowledge part is a mystery for brighter “sparks” to pursue.
The Maana system is a “search and discovery platform.” The write up quotes a Mr. Thompson who explains:
You can tell Maana, ‘I want to know all pieces of equipment that have led to most unplanned downtime,” Thompson says. After telling it to look in the Gulf and entering the appropriate EQP code, the system returns of histogram of pieces of equipment with the most amount of downtime. “So you get very quickly through a simple search and filtering operation a visual representation of the underlying data.”
The magic is that the system:
can join multiple disparate data sets and enable users to search and discover data across them in a semantic method. “It’s very simple to navigate the entire information space, which may be being fed from many different sources simultaneously,” Thompson says. “But you’re working at level of domain concepts.”
Okay, a modern Version of a federating system with clustering, correlation, classification, data mining, semantic, and correlation features.
The open source software issue is an interesting one. The write up points out that Maana relies on Apache Spark. However, I did a quick memory refresh on the Maana Web site which states here that the system is not based on Lucene/Solr.
The company is backed by Conoco Phillips, Chevron, Frost Data Capital, and GE Ventures. I also noticed that Intel has a stake in the company. Intel, in my opinion, continues to explore content processing. After the company’s adventure (maybe misadventure with Convera (formerly Excalibur Technologies), Intel took a stake in Endeca. Endeca sold itself to Oracle and Intel has obviously moved on to Maana.
Will the LucidWorks approach to Big Data capture customers who want to make sense of Big Data? Will Elasticsearch make inroads? My hunch is that Big Data will come under the influence of the systems built to deal with flows of real time data from disparate sources, including audio and video. Most of these firms use open source search and retrieval tools as a utility.
Maana appears to be positioning itself to be a key player in Big Data access. I will wait to see which horses make it to the finish line.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2015
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