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February 11, 2009, AIIM - Infonomics Magazine (www.aiim.org)

Bridging the gap between structured and unstructured information inches toward reality with new providers and new solutions

Smarter searching and alerting
...solutions by Attivio also push information out to workers drawn from various repositories. Attivio, based in Newtonville, Mass., is an enterprise search and BI solutions provider which has patented its technology. It uses "the precision of SQL and the fuzziness of search," to deliver enterprise information in dashboard form, says Sid Probstein, chief technology officer. "You get the performance of search and the ability to represent and model structured data exactly the way a relational database does, without the weaknesses of a traditional search engine that doesn't deal with related data."

Unlike relational databases, which only allow one schema, Probstein says "Our Active Intelligence Engine is a unified information access platform that happily accepts data from all types of systems, allowing far less effort to bring unstructured and structured data into an engine." A range of industries use the solution for portals, fraud detection, compliance, and customer service solutions, among other applications.

Probstein says heavily regulated industries as well as large businesses use Attivio solutions to mine company and customer intelligence.

Alerting functionality is built right into its Active Intelligence Engine. He uses the analogy of water in the form of a pond to describe legacy enterprise search, while active alerting can be thought of as an aqueduct or pipe for search that pumps appropriate information to all other systems that need it. Queries can be saved as alerts, among other sophisticated features.

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