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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
March 07, 2007

Table of Contents

Featured Content: CM Initiative Serves as Crime-Fighting Tool (Case Study)
AeroText supports open source
Nexidia Increases Index Speed of Audio Files and Search Speed
Funnelback Files Patent for Fluster
Lemur Consulting Granted £815,000 to Develop Search Engine
Attensa Releases Feed Server 1.1
Stable, scalable search
Alfresco 2.0
m-spatial Launches Converged Local Search
FAST's AIW unleashed
Inxight for Oracle
An e-discovery aid

Featured Content: CM Initiative Serves as Crime-Fighting Tool (Case Study)

ORGANIZATION: Riverside County Sheriff's Department, Special Investigations Bureau, Crime Analysis Unit, www.riversidesheriff.org

VENDOR OR SOLUTION PROVIDER OF CHOICE: ISYS Search Software, www.isys-search.com

Supporting Law Enforcement

The Riverside County Sheriff's Department covers nearly a 7,500-square-mile area in Southern California. The Crime Analysis Unit of the Special Investigations Bureau consists of 19 analysts who support the information needs of the various units of the department, from patrol officers and investigators to homicide to intelligence operations (such as organized crime, terrorism, and gang activity). "We're kind of a clearing house of information," says Brian Gray, crime analysis unit supervisor. "We monitor and maintain information and databases on individuals that are involved in criminal activity (such as parole and probation).We also use open source information or public source intelligence (including databases like LexisNexis). We basically find people and statistical information by looking at crime patterns, series and trends."

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Among the unit's other capabilities: utilizing mapping software to plot crime locations and using data to determine those crime patterns. It is also relied upon to determine where and when unit troops need to be deployed.

The unit plays a major role in the department's success. "This unit is mission-essential in our fight against crime and criminals," says Sheriff Bob Doyle. "We are fortunate to have a team of this caliber."

Managing Multiple Documents

Because Gray's unit has access to literally tens of thousands of documents, the implementation of an enterprise search solution that would make searching a variety of topics quickly was perhaps inevitable.

The need was enhanced after 9/11, when the unit began receiving documents from a wide collection of sources—and in a variety of formats (from text files to PDFs and HTML documents)—via e-mail. The crime analysis unit had to absorb content that ranged in size from a one-page flyer to a 600-page report. "If it's a single page, you can scan it and [understand] it," says Gray. "If it's a five hundred to six hundred page PDF file or word document, it's difficult to digest it; and maybe it's not something you need today. But it doesn't mean that a week from now or a year from now, you're not going to need that information."

It was imperative that the unit keep all of the information stored in a digital library where it could be easily accessed and searched when needed. "In the business world, time is money. But in law enforcement, time is everything," says Gray. "The faster you can produce information, the quicker response you have, the more likely it's going to lead to an effective response, such as an arrest. Our administration counts on us to produce quality intelligence in the shortest amount of time."

Investigating the Options

Gray says he was initially unaware of other vendors when he determined his unit needed an enterprise search solution. He only knew of a colleague who achieved success with his ISYS Search Software offering."In law enforcement, that works," says Gray. "People trust other agencies [rather] than a salesperson."

Gray says when he first heard of ISYS, he initially thought it could be used for internal documents.Yet, he wasn't sure how it would fit into his unit's processes because a lot of reports were handwritten and couldn't be scanned.When he saw the external documents arrive in technology-friendly formats, he decided to give it a try. Use of the ISYS: desktop product just expanded from there.

"Once we purchased it, we started to branch off," says Gray. "Instead of relying on what was being sent to us (documents from government agencies, for instance), now we could proactively seek articles (from other publications) and save those documents as well. So we have a wellrounded library we can depend on in the future."

Now, those internal documents are also part of the system. For example, analysts are required to complete a weekly log that outlines the duties they performed each day: what they accomplished, the cases they worked on, the investigators they worked with.Those logs are then saved into a folder. "If a month or year from now a detective comes back and [asks about an individual from the past], we don't have to waste the time going back and looking it up again.We can go to ISYS, enter the name, and it locates those logs. It lets us give them the information again or remember what we did."Weekly homicide analyst logs on the system date back to 2000.

Implementing and getting users accustomed to ISYS: desktop was far from time-consuming, recalls Gray. Implementation only involves loading the software onto a computer.Then, within a matter of minutes, the software has read through millions of words and made them available to enter a query.

The system has been used by the intelligence and homicide units for several years. The implementation continues today. Gray recently introduced it on the station level. The Internal Affairs department has also begun using ISYS as well.

Gray notes that using ISYS: desktop is as easy as the integration. "Within seconds, you have an answer to your question," says Gray. Once the system identifies relevant documents, users can click to open them and see their keywords highlighted in yellow.

A query menu begins a typical search. A user is asked to "find all documents that contain" a specific word. The query can be tailored in many ways; for example, it can be adjusted to contain additional words and even two words in the same paragraph.

 

A Partner in Solving Crimes

While Gray says the ISYS: desktop solution cannot be solely credited for solving crimes, it has certainly contributed to the successful resolution of cases investigated by the department. "You can't directly relate it as the one thing that helped solve a homicide," says Gray. "But it plays an important role in coming up with the pieces of information. It's seldom that one piece of information solves the case. It's a combination of lots of pieces of information together. ISYS allows us to bring several of those pieces of information together along with the evidence in a case.

"Much of what happens in the intelligence world is not something that leads to an arrest," says Gray. "It helps you understand a particular group. It's trying to be proactive; trying to understand the impact this group may have and stop things from occurring."

Gray recalls an instance in which an analyst was asked to locate reports containing references to an indvidual who was identified as a homicide suspect. The analyst conducted a search on the name and found the individual was involved in that crime and was also a suspect in a previous homicide. "This was something that ISYS captured because it was in a report, but it wasn't something that would have been in a record system," says Gray. "It allowed us to link this individual to more than one homicide based on the information that was in the weekly notes." Another analyst was able to check her weekly notes to find eight different cases associated with a crime. "It saved her time because the cases were old and not maintained locally," adds Gray. "She queried ISYS and didn't have to locate the files manually."

According to Gray, the benefits have been even more far-reaching."When the analysts see the benefits of storing this weekly log information, then they do a better job writing their logs," he says, adding that it helps the unit better promote itself and the services it provides. "Those are added benefits that have nothing to do with necessarily the power of the product," says Gray. "But because the product makes us successful, then that allows us to get better. It helps us with our reputation. That makes a big difference when you ask for a bigger group."

While the unit is comprised of 19 analysts today, the group was much smaller just 10 years ago. In 1996, there were only six in the unit. That growth has come from the successes the analysts have had," says Gray. "A part of that success has been the ability to organize and quickly retrieve the information we need."

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About the Author

MARJI MCCLURE (marjimcclure@sbcglobal.net) is a freelance writer who covers content, document and knowledge management for KMWorld and its sister publication, EContent.

Captions

Query results are listed according to relevance of the search terms entered. Users can preview an article at the bottom of the screen, where search terms are highlighted in yellow within the article.

Analysts with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department Crime Analysis Unit can narrow the results of their search by pinpointing the exact location of search terms within a document.

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AeroText supports open source

Lockheed Martin has released AeroText 5.1 for Linux, an open source operating system. AeroText is a deep text-mining and data extraction software tool.

Version 5.1 is said to provide a comprehensive, easy to use, data extraction tool. AeroText comes pre-configured to extract entities, relationships and events, while also providing a wizard-driven interface to extend these capabilities. Lockheed Martin reports the software is used by the international intelligence community to connect information from huge amounts of disparate text sources.

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Nexidia Increases Index Speed of Audio Files and Search Speed

Nexidia, a developer of phonetic based technology for rich media search and speech analytics solutions, has announced that they have significantly increased its technology's indexing and search speeds to help companies uncover valuable data from their audio files. Nexidia has optimized the algorithms of its own core phonetic-based audio search technology, resulting in greater index and search speeds. With these enhancements the index speed has increased from 66 to 82 times faster than real-time and the search speed has increased from 169,000 to 548,000 times faster than real-time on the same hardware. As a result of both Nexidia's enhanced technology and the use of more powerful hardware, the index speed is 341 times faster than real-time on a single dual processor server, which means the technology can render over 8,000 hours of audio data searchable per day.

(www.nexidia.com)  

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Funnelback Files Patent for Fluster

Enterprise search software vendor Funnelback has lodged a provisional patent application for its clustering engine--Fluster. Operating on-the-fly at query time, Fluster groups search results into themes based on document content to reveal how the search keywords have been used and in what context. Fluster's results are presented alongside the ranked search results, designed to enable users of all levels to explore volumes of content. Fluster is currently available for beta testing and is set to be publicly released with Funnelback's upcoming Version 7.

(http://funnelback.com)

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Lemur Consulting Granted £815,000 to Develop Search Engine

Lemur Consulting, a search engine company, is part of a consortium that has been awarded a U.K. Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) grant of £815,000 to build a web search engine. Lemur is helping to develop a new generation of web search engines. These will include deeper criteria for defining the relevance of the results returned. New factors reveal the intention of web page creators and users. For example, is the page designed for review, or for selling? Is the person making the query interested in researching, or buying? The DTI-led Technology Programme called for a £1.5 million web search engine project to be developed over two years.

(www.lemurconsulting.com)

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Attensa Releases Feed Server 1.1

Attensa, Inc., a developer of RSS software for businesses, has introduced significant enhancements to the Attensa Feed Server, a web feed server designed to distribute internal and external web feeds to users and groups behind the firewall.

Features of the Attensa Feed Server 1.1 include: its availability as a Linux software appliance combining the Feed Server 1.1 application with an open source LAMP stack that readily installs on industry standard servers. The Attensa Feed Server will also be offered as a hosted service to meet the needs of small and medium businesses and workgroups and project teams in larger organizations; administrators and users can set up dynamic searches across 18 web, blog, and social network search engines. The ability to add search from premium content providers is also available. Search feeds are hosted on the server and can be channeled to specific users and groups. Users can add new searches through the Attensa Feed Server's web reader. Typing search keyword queries once will launch searches across multiple search engines. Search results are updated automatically on a continuous basis; the ability for managers, team leaders, and administrators to access new reports based on Attensa's AttentionStream analytics. Detailed Attention reports are searchable based on feeds, groups, and users. Reports can be used to identify must read feeds and the most effective communications channels for getting information to specific users and groups; the server uses Attensa's AttentionStream processing to intelligently manage and direct workload demands to task specific servers; administrators have the ability to set strip out potentially malicious attachments and to set up lists of blocked feeds and enclosures. Administrators also have the ability to disable scripting from within feeds for additional security. Users and groups can be imported from LDAP directories or created specifically on the feed server. Users and groups are searchable to find and assign administrator and user permissions in large organizations; a browsable feed library where users with permission can browse through the feed library to create their own custom reading lists; and documentation for users and administrators is available through the web interface. Access to the Attensa Support portal is available through the admin interface.

(www.attensa.com)

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Stable, scalable search

Vivisimo has introduced its Velocity 5.5 enterprise search platform, which, the company says, delivers high scalability and fault tolerance to enterprises with growing amounts of data and ever-changing regulatory demands. Vivisimo further emphasizes the new version's ease of use for both administrators and knowledge workers.

Velocity 5.5 enables network administrators to easily replicate instances of a single index across multiple services, allowing 99.99% up time, according to Vivisimo. For example, the company says, if one server crashes, the second or third server storing a copy of that index will fulfill the search request. Vivisimo adds that the new version also allows administrators to quickly segment an index onto multiple servers for maximum application performance in high-usage, data-intensive scenarios. Both replication and segmentation of indexes are accomplished through a simple point-and-click within the Velocity Web administrative interface, taking minutes to configure.

Velocity 5.5 also offers new search functionality to enhance the user experience. It now handles such advanced queries as word proximity, complex date range and natural language. In addition, Velocity 5.5 offers a tool for query expansion. For example, some names have many different spellings because they were transliterated into the Roman alphabet from other writing systems (Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). Velocity 5.5 offers the ability to suggest alternative queries for misspellings, word stemming, alternative translations and synonyms--all based upon administrator-defined content.

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Alfresco 2.0

Alfresco, the first to provide an open source enterprise content management solution, has announced the availability of Alfresco 2.0 for the distributed enterprise. The company says distributed content management provides users with integrated repositories, search across multiple repositories as well as the Internet, and also enables simple applications to take advantage of access to multiple repositories.

Alfresco further reports its new offering delivers simple, standards-based, distributed search encompassing not only multiple Alfresco repositories but the Internet as well. Complementing that capability is the company's content solution packaging mechanism, Alfresco Module Packaging (AMP). Alfresco 2.0 also delivers an integrated content platform with the production release of Web Content Management and AMP-enabled Records Management.

Alfresco highlights the following features in 2.0:

  • Open search--standards-based search across multiple Alfresco content repositories and other RSS or Atom repositories including blogs and wikis;
  • Web content management production release--simple and rapid import of existing Web sites with support for any content authoring or Web development tool;
  • Alfresco Module Packaging (AMP)--complete content solutions to share globally across all repositories, includes code, content model, content and folder structures; and
  • AMP-enabled records management--develop and consistently distribute records management policies according to corporate rules through AMP.
Alfresco 2.0 is immediately available for download here.

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m-spatial Launches Converged Local Search

m-spatial, a provider of mobile local search, has launched its solution for Converged Local Search--a new initiative designed to stimulate mass market consumer adoption of local search on mobile devices. Converged Local Search is designed to enable Mobile Network Operators, Directory Providers, and Personal Navigation Providers to realize the potential of local search by linking access to local information across websites, 118/411 directory services, mobile data services, and personal navigation devices. Converged Local Search can help Personal Navigation Providers and 118/411 Providers by providing their 'on the move' consumer customers with access to the additional rich and dynamic local information delivered by m-spatial's mobile local search capabilities as an extension to existing services.

(www.m-spatial.com)

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FAST's AIW unleashed

FAST has introduced its Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW), which it says allows users to capitalize on their entire collection of information to make better informed decisions for competitive advantage. The company further says that FAST AIW integrates an end-to-end framework of products to unify search and business intelligence.

FAST claims AIW fundamentally redefines business intelligence with a shift away from the traditional data warehouse. Further, the company says, it directly addresses the limitations of data warehouses--cost, architecture complexity and limited scalability--as well as the inherent restrictions on traditional BI tools that cannot deliver timely, dynamic data to all users. Alternatively, FAST puts the business intelligence solutions on top of the search platform to integrate and orchestrate all of the information needed to make BI truly effective. Users can directly search and navigate business intelligence data in an ad hoc manner, then display relevant, usable information to users without the need for predefined report creation.

Additionally, says FAST, AIW also leverages the knowledge buried within all of an organization's unstructured content to provide actual business intelligence, enabling companies to generate new business insights from their unstructured information.

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Inxight for Oracle

Inxight has introduced SmartDiscovery Awareness Server for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g as part of its participation in the Oracle Secure Search Initiative. Inxight's SmartDiscovery Awareness Server for Oracle Search 10g allows users to simultaneously search not only their Oracle database and applications, but any public Web or Deep Web site, or other data sources using a single query. Awareness Server then allows users to see at a glance and filter search results sets by the relevant people, companies, products and other information contained within them.

Inxight says it offers more than 35 entity types out of the box. With the additional purchase of Inxight ThingFinder Professional, administrators may customize the system to filter by custom list-based or pattern-based entities, such as products, terrorist names, gene sequences and more.

In addition, the companies say, keyword-in-context summaries are enhanced by an automated "Top Mentions" list, revealing the most important people, places, companies and other information contained within the full text of a document - helping users quickly get a better sense of the true content of a document.

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An e-discovery aid

OnSite3 has introduced eView, a client-controlled online document review application built upon a SQL-based engine.

The company explains eView has been designed to facilitate improved document workflow, including advanced collaboration, reviewer management and high-speed search capabilities across paper or electronic documents.

The software enables review teams to perform the following functions: creating users, assigning permissions, creating tag and conflict rules, managing productions, privilege logs and generating reports, all in a centralized location.

OnSite3 reports it offers a complete line of litigation support solutions for computer forensics, electronic discovery, online review and consulting services.

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