The range of new features and enhancements contained in Convera`s RetrievalWare 8.1 deliver a comprehensive knowledge discovery platform for information-intensive enterprises in both the commercial and government market segments.
"RetrievalWare 8.1 further reduces the time and cost of finding information in high volumes of structured and unstructured data to improve business process efficiency and increase return on information assets," says Piet Dempsey, managing director of asset management solution provider Knowledge Focus, the sole African distributor of RetrievalWare.
The new knowledge discovery services in RetrievalWare 8.1 are based on industry-standard Web services and XML. They dramatically reduce the time, cost and risk of enterprise application and portal integration by mixing and matching large, re-usable software components and bolting together complex, high-quality knowledge discovery engines - all working across multiple applications.
"Because the same RetrievalWare software services are also available as Java services that are based on industry-standard J2EE, it is possible for the enterprises to architect RetrievalWare-based solutions across multiple operating systems and platforms - .NET or J2EE," Dempsey adds.
RetrievalWare 8.1 also features semantic indexing, categorisation, classification, profiling, e-mail alerts, search, entity extraction and folder services. All utilise a single unified index, which enables these services to be combined in any order programmatically to support a broad array of discovery and text mining applications.
Dempsey explains: "Semantic indexing utilises general-purpose and domain-specific semantic networks to complete semantic analysis and discover synonyms, broader, narrower and related terms. This improves search results by identifying all relevant documents to a search rather than just retrieving document that match keywords."
"Rather than being forced to fit searches within the constraints of inflexible categories, RetrievalWare 8.1 users can dynamically create their own information categories based on the context of their search at the moment," he continues. "These categories can interrelate and display information from widely disparate sources and locations, enabling users to discover knowledge that might have otherwise remained hidden."
Profiling is a content-filtering feature in RetrievalWare 8.1 that enables real-time monitoring of information and execution of queries on individual documents in live data sources. An e-mail alerts feature works in conjunction with profiling to enable users to keep track of breaking news, constantly changing Web sites, portals, content management systems and collaboration systems, automatically and in real-time.
As the volume and frequency of enterprise content grows, it becomes very expensive and time-consuming for knowledge workers to identify the patterns and relationships critical to discovery. RetrievalWare 8.1`s entity extractor solves this problem by extracting entity information from real-time and archived data sources and providing relevant access to information, which further aids knowledge discovery.
Language detection, encoding detection, conversion and UTF-8 ready language processors provide a complete cross-lingual knowledge discovery platform. RetrievalWare 8.1 offers 14 language processors, including Arabic, Chinese and Japanese for natural language processing. Additionally, more than 60 pre-supplied domain-specific taxonomies and classifications are featured, as well as 23 taxonomies in nine different languages, eight general and cross-lingual semantic cartridges and 22 domain-specific semantic cartridges.
RetrievalWare 8.1 also incorporates Knowledge Workbench V3.0 to create, manage, tailor, benchmark and extend taxonomy`s and semantic resources for increased search accuracy and relevance. Designed for subject matter experts and librarians, the application is cross-platform and language-neutral.
"The addition of knowledge structures in RetrievalWare 8.1 such as semantic networks, taxonomies, thesauri and entity lists that can be mixed-and-matched to best achieve effective location of relevant data is in line with increasing user awareness of the richer content that can be exposed intelligently. As the semantic organisation of content takes on increasing importance, Convera is well positioned to continue to lead with best-of-breed capabilities for increasing the findability of critical information nuggets needed in the daily tasks of knowledge workers and analysts," Dempsey concludes.
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