How the AIE Platform Delivers Active Intelligence

Hybrid index for storing any kind of information
AIE ingests all types of structured data and unstructured content, building a universal index of unified information that can be accessed with a single query, helping you gain deeper insights and detect complex patterns.

Query-time JOIN of all Information
AIE's patent-pending query-time JOIN operator allows selection of relationships across tables, connecting common fields to represent one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. AIE extends JOIN to include both data and content and to execute at query time, retrieving any sources that include a shared term and ensuring that the most up-to-date information is included. This JOIN capability does not rely on a data schema set in advance; in fact, AIE is schema-neutral and allows you to add a table at any time without having to change the data model or re-ingest information.

SQL Support
AIE supports SQL - the universally adopted query language of data analysis tools. SQL allows precision and complexity far beyond the capabilities of search engine queries and uses standard operators to apply AIE’s analytical capabilities across disparate sources. Attivio’s AI-SQL extensions go beyond standard SQL - combining the capabilities of relational and search queries and analytics and creating tables on the fly without first defining a schema.

JDBC Driver Support
Attivio’s JDBC driver allows standards-based integration of AIE with thousands of off-the-shelf BI, reporting and analytical tools, enabling these applications to access and analyze all information from the AIE index, including unstructured content.

Advanced Content Analytics
AIE includes a complete set of analytical capabilities that provide deeper insight, including the ability to link unstructured content and structured data, discovery of entities, concepts and key phrases.

Sentiment Analysis
Extracts and measures opinions expressed in a document and in specific entities in a document. Entity-level sentiment analysis can show that an opinion is positive overall and includes specific negatives (e.g., great phone, but poor battery life). Sentiment Analysis includes models for common domain analysis and the ability to create custom models.

Content Spotlighting
Gives business managers powerful editorial control over the end-user search experience.  You can use it to manage result ordering for sets of keywords or create promotions that pull in external content (such as advertisements). You can also control when, how and for which sets of content a spotlight operates. Content spotlighting supports editorial review of changes.

Classification
Automatically categorizes documents using rules or machine-learning-based classification models derived from training documents.

Comprehensive Search Capabilities
AIE supports all standard search methods, including keyword search, +/- syntax, phrase search, fielded search, Boolean matching, wildcards, proximity, fuzzy search and more.  AIE also provides spelling suggestions based on indexed content or dictionaries, synonym and acronym expansion, etc.

Custom Relevancy Profiles
Control results with relevancy profiles customized with one or more boosting options. Profiles can be altered on the fly at query time.

Powerful Linguistics Functions
AIE’s linguistics capabilities include support for detecting 60 languages. (See Optional Modules for details about additional linguistic support.)

Advanced Text Extraction
AIE can extract content and metadata from more than 500 document formats, including child and embedded documents.  Notable examples include support for Microsoft Office, PDF, XML, HTML, email, image files (for extraction of metadata only) and archive formats (zip, tar, gzip, jar).

Real-time Updates
AIE is designed for real-time operation. New documents can be added and made available for search in batches of 100 or 1000 in less than two seconds. Important individual fields can be updated nearly instantly, even under heavy query load, without any need to re-index the entire document.

Real-time Actions
Any query AIE can execute can be saved as an alert.   Thereafter, on a scheduled or continuous basis, new data that matches the query is automatically sent to a designated workflow, which can execute a simple action, like notifying a user via email, or more sophisticated tasks, such as updating a database or triggering a CRM application.

Flexible Workflow
Customizable workflows integrate processing, querying and actions. Workflows can include linear processes, conditional logic (branching), loops for handling embedded objects (e.g., email attachments), multi-node configurations, etc. Time-consuming steps can be offloaded to dedicated hardware asynchronously to allow long, complex processing to run independently without negative impact on the user.

Active Security Model
AIE’s Active Security Model expedites permission updating by storing documents, groups, users and Access Control Lists (ACLs) in a separate security table in the AIE index - without requiring a database. The ALLOW and DENY JOIN clauses bring together documents that match the user’s query and instantly verify which documents they are authorized to view without any need for pre-filtering.

Guaranteed Indexing
AIE can be deployed in a fault-tolerant configuration that protects against information loss. If a server or network link breaks down, AIE continues to accept new content by using the remaining servers.  When the failed servers come back up, they will automatically catch up and put themselves back in service, with no manual intervention required in most cases.

Certified Multi-Node Configurations
AIE supports certified configurations for the most common customer deployments: high availability ingestion, high availability querying, guaranteed indexing (fault-tolerant ingestion), and dynamic load-balanced content processing, which allows adding new nodes for compute-intensive content processing, such as text extraction and OCR.

Linear, Incremental Scalability
Unlike most legacy search engines, which require you to determine in advance how many servers you’ll need for the index, AIE lets you add servers incrementally as data and query volumes increase or as performance requirements change – without re-indexing. This seamless, incremental scalability means you buy only the hardware you need today without risking costly upgrades, lengthy re-indexing or downtime.
In addition, server performance-to-density ratio can be tuned to meet requirements.

Powerful Performance
AIE’s performance capabilities include: high-speed content ingestion (30 GB/hour), index size up to 100M records on a single server, hundreds or thousands of queries per second per server and sub-second query response time.

Easy to Install, Configure and Use
AIE is flexible, customizable and scalable. Users can customize the AIE schema, components and workflows used to process content, queries and results. Administrators can customize the system to add new stages and workflows and define multiple schemas for multi-tenant environments. All workflows and stages are configured via semantically consistent XML files.