Unified Information Access Blog

Welcome to Attivio's Unified Information Access Blog. Join us for discussions on topics ranging from enterprise search solutions, information access insights, Agile software development methodology to programming with Java. We hope you'll find the articles informative and participate in the discussions by leaving a comment.

Attivio Active Intelligence Engine DemoFull SQL and ODBC connectivity seamlessly adds context from unstructured content to big data, business intelligence and analytics

Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Version 3.0 of Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine. Please click here to read the full announcement.

There are three core themes of this release: Extending the power and value of AIE's unified information access capabilities, increasing speed of deployment and integration, and adding to AIE's robust platform features.

The innovations and refinements are too numerous to detail in this article, so we'll focus on a few key highlights. Customers and partners can log into the Attivio Developer Network (ADN) for complete release details and features.

Extending the Power and Value of AIE's Unified Information Access Capabilities with SQL and ODBC

Despite BI's advances, companies continue to struggle with responding quickly to a continuously evolving information landscape and the need for ease of information access that business users require. And big data technologies address sheer volume, but not the variety, velocity and complexity now referred to as extreme information.

Attivio AIE 3.0 gets to the heart of these problems by supporting the right information access method for each user in the enterprise and integrating all data sources, regardless of type.

What this means is that AIE 3.0 delivers insight and access into the business activity that is most important to each user's particular function and corporate directive. AIE gives users who don't understand dashboard construction or data relationships the ability to interact with information using the simple and powerful interface of search or role-based dashboards.

For more technical users who want to look at data in a very analytical way and are comfortable working with data visualization, AIE 3.0 now offers the most accessible and standards-based approach to analytics of any UIA platform. Through its JDBC and newly announced ODBC drivers and full SQL support, AIE seamlessly integrates with virtually any BI tool. Customers can now leverage the powerful capabilities of tools like Tableau, MicroStrategy, QlikView, Jaspersoft, Cognos, Business Objects and many more — bringing the rich context of unstructured content for users of the most cutting edge BI, visualization and analysis tools.

Developers working with AIE will appreciate new features that enable faster source integration, faster application development, reduced development cycles with dynamic configuration, a toolkit to quickly build Active Dashboards and deeper insight into document content.

Administrators will find enhancements for simpler multi-node configuration management, greater JOIN flexibility for streamlined index configuration due to increased JOIN flexibility and dynamic change configuration to minimize developer intervention requirements.

Clayton Christensen, who revolutionized the study of innovation with his groundbreaking The Innovator's Dilemma, recently published The Innovator's DNA. The book identifies five specific habits that characterize highly successful innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. These traits share a common thread of inquisitiveness. Innovators excel at discovering connections between seemingly unconnected things.

Professor Christensen notes that the most successful innovative companies actively value and encourage these same five habits in their employees. Unified access to all enterprise information sources, spanning all types of information — from structured data (databases, data warehouses, etc.) to unstructured content (documents, SharePoint, web content, email, etc.) cultivates and enables these critical habits.

Thankfully, this is not some desired future state of technology; this is unified information access from Attivio, available and actively used with success by Fortune 10 global leaders and bold startups alike.

We'll cover more key features in upcoming posts. To view the full Active Intelligence Engine datasheet, please click here.

One of the follow-up questions I've received regarding the post on Triples and Graphs concerns using the GRAPH operator to identify nodes in a graph who are within a certain number of links (edges) to another node. This is a typically important use case, especially when dealing with social networks, and you want to find a list of people who are one or two nodes away from a specific person.

The answer is that the GRAPH operator does support this type of querying. Let's update the graph from the last post to add a few more "knows" links:

GRAPH Data Sample

If we want to find all the people Bob knows, we can query it like so:

GRAPH(name:Bob, ON="knows=entityId")

This returns Peter, Henry and Steve. Steve is included only because he knows Henry, and Henry knows Bob.
If this definition of "knows" is too broad, we can rewrite the query to find only people who Joe knows himself, as follows:

GRAPH(name:Bob, ON="knows=entityId", depth=1)

This returns Peter and Henry only, as they are one link away. Steve is two links away and so is not returned in the result set.

Perhaps we want to find people up to three links away, but give a relevancy boost to those one link away in the result list:

BOOST(GRAPH(name:Bob, ON="knows=entityId", depth=3), 
GRAPH(name:Bob, ON="knows=entityId", depth=1))

This would return Peter and Henry, first, each one link away from Bob, then Steve, who is two links away.

The GRAPH operator makes it very easy to explore social relationships and create scenarios similar to the Oracle of Bacon. Government and law enforcement applications are easy to imagine. Social analytics significantly increase conversion rates in eBusiness as well.

Thanks for the great question!

This post links to articles that summarize Attivio's products and vision as described in previous blog entries.

First, a listing of articles that present the core idea of Unified Information Access (UIA):


Next, articles that talk about key capabilities of Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), the leading platform for developing UIA applications:


Finally, a listing of articles that detail specific features of AIE:

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