Active Intelligence Engine: A Complete Unified Information Access Platform

Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine™ is a complete unified information access (UIA) platform, providing seamless indexing, joining and presenting structured data and unstructured content. By uniting content and text analytics with data from any source, AIE brings immediacy and depth to the information that drives your organization.

AIE eliminates information silos while enabling organizations to rapidly fulfill new informational needs. As a result, business users gain new, real-time business insights that help build revenue, cut costs and increase competitiveness — insights that might otherwise have gone undiscovered.

A proven enterprise-ready platform, AIE provides the unified information organizations need to rethink, reframe and resolve business challenges — that's information-driven business agility.

Active Intelligence Enhances Unified Information Access

Hybrid index for storing any kind of information
AIE ingests all types of structured data and unstructured content, building a schema-less index of unified information that can be accessed with a single query, helping you gain deeper insights and detect complex patterns. Unlike a traditional data warehouse, AIE does not require relationships between any data or content to be defined in advance prior to ingestion. AIE also ingests structured data on a table-by-table basis, retaining logical structure and data integrity — unlike other information solutions that "flatten" or denormalize databases, severely diminishing their business value.

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.

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.

ODBC/JDBC Driver Support
Unlike other enterprise information solutions, Attivio's ODBC/JDBC connectivity enables the integration of AIE with popular business intelligence (BI) tools, complimenting and expanding your organization's BI infrastructure investments.

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 (optional)
Extracts and measures positive or negative emotions expressed in a document and in specific entities in a document, producing quantifiable data that can be used in trend analysis, charts, etc.

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 Engine (optional)
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 19 languages.

Advanced Text Extraction
AIE can extract content, metadata and formatting from more than 600 document types, 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 1,000 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.

Compelling User Interface

attivio dynamic facets, search facets Dynamic Interfaces
AIE delivers the power of UIA to a variety of interfaces, including dashboards, reports and search results. In any type of interface, including simple search results, information can include graphical representations of relevant material. Graphics such as charts can include data from databases combined with data extracted from text. Related content such as emails, logs and other text files can also be displayed in response to a single query for information on a topic.

Navigation Methods to Facilitate Discovery
AIE supports the latest navigation and discovery tools to simplify finding information. AIE corrects spelling and suggests matches during users’ query input. Users can also navigate and drill down by clicking on graphical displays.
AIE’s Dynamic Facet Recommendation automatically suggests the most relevant facets and the order in which they should be displayed (see figure). You can combine dynamic and static facets to further direct navigation, ensuring users see information that is both comprehensive and relevant.

Optimized, Tunable Relevancy
Out-of-the-box relevancy can be refined to tune the balance of recall and precision and to boost multiple specified options (e.g., freshness, geographic location, demographic profile, role, proximity, etc.), further ensuring users see appropriate or specifically designated information. With relevancy profiles, boosting options can be set at design time or at runtime for a user, group of users, or per query.

High-Performance, Scalable, Secure Enterprise Platform

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. AIE provides real-time, high-performance security regardless of what information the end user is accessing or how the end user is accessing the information.

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.

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. Administrators can rapidly integrate new information sources, and create and modify dynamic workflows using web-based user interfaces while AIE is running.

Rapid Development & Deployment

AIE is designed to enable rapid development of applications and solutions, ensuring that your return on investment in AIE includes expedited time to value. Customers have found that AIE solutions can be developed in less than half the time that is typical for development on a platform - weeks instead of months. Rapid development is made possible by:

A single API so all communication to and from the platform is centralized and consistent.
Flexible data modeling so solutions are simpler to implement, accepting diverse schemas and requiring less upfront design work. Avoids lengthy data optimization and ETL stages.
Templates, profiles, and workflows so predictable, repeatable tasks can be simplified and expedited by allowing developers to quickly modify and apply packaged forms. These reusable elements also help promote best practices.