Insightful Corporation, a provider of software solutions for analysis of numeric and text data, has announced the launch of InFact 3.0, for text analysis and relationship search. InFact 3.0 is designed to offer a new interactive text query language that enables users to execute custom, flexible, and complex searches from a simple Web interface (much like familiar Internet search tools). Other new features in InFact 3.0 include more precise and expressive linguistic data representations, improved scalability, and the ability to integrate an external "dictionary" of terms often called a proprietary ontology for rapid customization to address unique problems of specific vertical markets.

InFact is intended to enable professional analysts and researchers to accurately uncover facts and relationships within text documents. InFact parses the structure of each sentence and is designed to "understand" the sentence components, such as which words are nouns and which are verbs. Combinations of nouns, verbs, and other sentence components connote relationships, actions, or facts and are stored in a searchable database structure. Because InFact is designed to understand the grammar, syntax, semantics, and linguistic structure of each sentence, InFact's query syntax can be used to search for very specific relationships, actions, or facts. Infact's query language is designed to enable analysts to formulate searches that not only search for a particular relationship, action or fact, but also understand action directionality (i.e., company A bought company B, and not vice versa).

In addition, users of InFact can search for relationships involving entity types (e.g., search for any person or organization that was involved in a particular action, not just a particular person), and constrain results based on Boolean combinations and metadata constraints (e.g. the document was published between 1995 and 2005, and the action happened in either North America or Europe).

InFact is designed to ingest millions of documents and update its search database with no downtime. A distributed and flexible architecture can be configured to meet specific organizational needs whether documents reside in legacy database systems, the Web, institutional news feeds, or other enterprise systems. Customers can incorporate proprietary ontologies (with simple or multi-parent taxonomies, synonyms, acronyms, and new entity type assignments), endowing the InFact system with knowledge of a vertical domain. A Java Search API enables client or server side development, embedding of all InFact functions in other systems, or integration with third-party visualization tools. InFact is built on case insensitive natural language parsing technology.