Oracle Suggests a PeopleSoft Upgrade
September 2, 2015
PeopleSoft is a popular human resources management software and like all software it occasionally needs to be upgraded. TriCore Solutions suggests that instead of using Verity, your next upgrade to PeopleSoft should be the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES). TriCore Solutions brags about helping clients upgrade to SES in the article, “Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) And PeopleSoft 9.2.”
Oracle SES offers a secure, high-quality search across all enterprise platforms as well as analytics, intuitive search interface, secure crawling, indexing, and searching. When SES is deployed into an enterprise system it also offers several key capabilities:
- “Connectivity to Legacy Repositories. SES allows companies to access their most valuable assets – information about its specific business, its processes, products, customers, and documents that previously resided in proprietary repositories. Connectors include interfaces for EMC Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus Notes, Oracle‘s E-Business Suite and Oracle Siebel among others.
- Security: The ability to search password protected sources securely. Oracle‘s search technology provides single-sign-on (SSO) based security where available, and can also employ application-specific security where SSO is not available.
- High quality search results: Brings for the Intranet a high level of relevance that users associate with Internet searches.
- Going beyond keywords. As the volume of information grows, users need advanced search techniques like the ability to categorize and cluster search results for iterative navigation.”
It is evident that Oracle SES offers a comprehensive search feature to PeopleSoft and maybe a better product, but what does Verity have to offer?
Whitney Grace, September 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Gray Lady Snipes at Google Play
September 2, 2015
Yo, gentle reader, the Alphabet Google is misspelling these days. The European Commission is annoying with its inquiries. I heard that India, yep, India, is starting to view the GOOGs as worthy of a probe.
I read “Rousting the Book Pirates from Google.” (David Segal, New York Times, August 30, 2015, page 3 of the Business Section) The Gray Lady finds the GOOGs newsworthy. I don’t by the way. For me, the GOOGs have been playing by their rules since 2006. I wonder why no one noticed when the GOOGs shifted from relevance to math club monetization.
The write up focuses attention on alleged Google Play and its emergence as “a den of iniquity and veritable cesspool of piracy.”
The GOOGs are busy. As the write up points out, the problem of a particular pirated or illegal or cesspool book has been resolved.
I found it encouraging that Google’s staff are “pleasant.”
There you go. Pleasant.
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2015
The Four Vs Arrive for Semantic Search
September 1, 2015
When I first encountered the four Vs, I thought someone was recycling the mnemonic trick I was taught when I was a wee pre-retirement person.
I associate the four Vs with IBM and Vivisimo. The hook up is probably a consequence of my flawed thought processes. I have a slide in my files showing an illustration of Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity artfully presented as a cartoon.
One of the goslings showed me this image, but I am not sure it is the diagram of which I speak. Here it is, and you can figure out how the four balls, the plugs, and the tough to read cyan type explain Big Data.
These have migrated to semantic search. Now that’s as good a home for these buzzwords as any of the suburban developments in Jargonville.
As applied to semantic search, the four Vs appear to guide the would be enemies of relevance to write a lot, make lots of changes, post content in many forms, and provide “accurate” information.
Good advice.
I assume that somewhat revenue thirst search engine optimization experts will be raking in the dollars and euros explaining these concepts to their clients.
I am still baffled about the connection between IBM, Vivisimo, and Big Data. I will leave semantic search to the SEO mavens and the mid tier consultants whom I associate with hard to read azure colors. I much prefer the hard edge tones of the blue chip folks.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2015
Thetus Savanna Updated
September 1, 2015
I read “Savanna 4.4 Introduces Application Wide Enhancements for Improved All Source Analysis.” The title of the news release reveals that Thetus is a provider of technology to law enforcement and intelligence entities. The notion of “all source” implies that disparate information can be processed and important signals extracted.
According to the write up:
Savanna 4.4 features include: [1] Geospatial Occurrence visualization: By combining Occurrences (people, organizations, things, places and events), with Map, users are now able to view geospatial data from one or more Occurrences on a Map to visually compare events and places to find trends. [2] Customizable styles with Linknet: In Linknet, a tool to convey networks of people, places, events, and things, customizable nodes allow users to change the look and style of a Linknet to easily pinpoint specific nodes or information. Make your point clear and bring life to your link analysis with this customized styling. [3] Connect and filter events with Timeline: In Timeline, a temporal visualization of Occurrence events, users can filter Timeline data by date and display the connection between events that are common to multiple Occurrences in order to compare and connect events.
For more information, you will need to contact the company. The firm’s Web site provides some suggestions.
Stephen E Arnold, August 30, 2015
Forbes Bitten by Sci-Fi Bug
September 1, 2015
The article titled Semantic Technology: Building the HAL 9000 Computer on Forbes runs with the gossip from the Smart Data Conference this year. Namely, that semantic technology has finally landed. The article examines several leaders of the field including Maana, Loop AI Labs and Blazegraph. The article mentions,
“Computers still can’t truly understand human language, but they can make sense out of certain aspects of textual content. For example, Lexalytics (www.lexalytics.com) is able to perform sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and ambiguity resolution. Sentiment analysis can determine whether some text – a tweet, say, expresses a positive or negative opinion, and how strong that opinion is. Entity extraction identifies what a paragraph is actually talking about, while ambiguity resolution solves problems like the Paris Hilton one above.”
(The “Paris Hilton problem” referred to is distinguishing between the hotel and the person in semantic search.) In spite of the excitable tone of the article’s title, its conclusion is much more measured. HAL, the sentient computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, remains in our imaginations. In spite of the exciting work being done, the article reminds us that even Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, is still without the “curiosity or reasoning skills of any two-year-old human.” For the more paranoid among us, this might be good news.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bank Exports IT to India
September 1, 2015
Computer World’s article, “As It Sets IT Layoffs, Citizens Bank Shifts Work To India Via Web” sounds like it should have been published five years ago. It was not that long ago when Americans were in an uproar about jobs being outsourced to China and India, but many of those jobs have returned to the US or replaced with an alternative. Despite falling out of interest with the mainstream media, jobs are still being outsourced to Asia. Citizens Bank is having their current IT employees train their replacements in a “knowledge transfer” and they will be terminated come December.
Citizens Bank signed a five-year services contract with IBM for IT services. IBM owns a large scale IT services company in India, which pays its workers a fraction of the current Citizens Bank IT workers.
As one can imagine, the Citizens Bank employees are in an uproar:
“The number of layoffs is in dispute. Employees said as many as 150 Citizen Bank IT workers were being laid off. But this number doesn’t include contractors. IBM will be consolidating the bank’s IT infrastructure services, and, as part of that, the bank is consolidating from four vendors to one vendor, IBM. This change will result in the elimination of some contractor jobs, and when contractors are added, the total layoff estimate by employees ranges from 250 to 350.”
It is reported that some IT workers are being offered comparable positions with IBM, while others are first in line for jobs in other branches of Citizens Bank. However, the IBM jobs appear to be short term and the other bank jobs do not appear to be turning up.
Other companies are shifting their IT work overseas much to the displeasure of IT workers, who thought they would be assured job security for the rest of their lives. IT workers place the blame on companies wanting to increase profits and not caring about their employees. What is going on with Citizens Bank and other companies is not new. It has been going on for decades, but that does not make the harm to Americans any less.
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph