Business Objects, a provider of business intelligence solutions, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Inxight Software Inc. Inxight is a provider of software solutions for unstructured information discovery, including text analytics, federated search, and data visualization. Financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in July of 2007, were not disclosed. Inxight brings a combination of text analytics, federated search, and visualization capabilities to the BusinessObjects XI platform designed to enable customers to discover, manage, and analyze unstructured content inside and outside of their organization.

(www.inxight.com; www.businessobjects.com)

Exalead, a provider of search software for business and the web, has announced the addition of a new Wikipedia search application in its exalead one:search platform, the technology foundation for Exalead's product portfolio--from the desktop to the enterprise and the web. Users of Exalead's web search engine can search, browse, and navigate the Wikipedia database by making use of the company's new vertical search capability that has been added to the exalead one:search technology platform. The Wikipedia search application, the first in a series of vertical search functions from Exalead, can be launched by clicking a Wikipedia tab on the Exalead search engine's home page. With the integration of topic maps, all related terms and categories will be presented in the form of a tag cloud. Users can then click on a word in the cloud to refine the query.

(www.exalead.com; www.wikipedia.org)  

Spoke Software Inc., a provider of the Open Network for business people, has launched a set of search tools to give visitors and members access to Spoke’s online business contact directory from search tools. Anyone can access Spoke’s directory of business contacts and company information by leveraging new search tools with Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer 7, and Yahoo! Spoke provides the business community with an online resource for professional networking, job and candidate searches, and discovering business opportunities. Spoke members have access to information about more than 35 million people across over 900,000 companies. Options include: the ability to add the Spoke search option to Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 to research people and companies; the ability to use the Spoke person/company finder to search for people and companies from a Google homepage; and the ability to use the Spoke Yahoo! Widget to find people and companies from the desktop. The search tools are free and currently available.

(www.spoke.com)  

Technorati has announced changes to its website. These changes include: integrated search to provide a live 360 degree results page where Technorati’s new integrated search combines keywords, tags, and site directories into one amalgamate, platform agnostic search to provide a results page drawing from social media sites across the web; videos, photos, and blog posts all have its own homepage; search.technorati.com, which provides a layout for blog searchers designed to provide all the statistics and rankings still available from the normal Technorati site, but without all the images and videos that load on the main Technorati homepage; and a new layout.

(www.technorati.com)  

IBM has announced new self-learning content classification software developed to automatically categorize large volumes of enterprise information, making it easier to find, access, and use. IBM’s content classification software offerings were designed to help organizations understand what content exists, whether it is important, and how it should be handled. The new software also can automatically classify vast amounts of previously unmanaged content so it can be retrieved and used for business purposes.

The new IBM Classification Module for OmniFind Discovery Edition and IBM Classification Module for IBM FileNet P8 provide a platform for managing all types of classification for content archiving; compliance solutions; email management; content centric business process management solutions, and taxonomy management, as well as in applications for case resolution, contact center, and online support offerings. IBM’s content classification software automatically learns and interprets the meaning of unstructured text such as in documents, emails, and customer interactions ¾ in real-time. The software understands not only the words used, but also the context of the language as well as associated metadata. The self-learning IBM classification software is designed to become more accurate over time without requiring human adjustment. IBM Classification Module for OmniFind Discovery Edition is enabled for Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments and can deliver content classification as a service to any content centric application, helping automate processes and decision- making to determine how a piece of content should be used. It can also classify emails for online contact center applications to automatically prioritize certain customer situations over others. The IBM Classification Module for OmniFind Discovery Edition analyzes unstructured and semi-structured content and metadata, allowing previously untapped information to be classified so it can be found and reused. The content can be classified within existing taxonomies or the system can propose new taxonomies.

The IBM Classification Module for IBM FileNet P8 automates tasks such as document management and collaboration. It also was designed to help improve compliance tasks such as declaring records, efficiently performing electronic discovery over content, and monitoring email for risk identification. It provides the ability to expand the reach of content management in a scalable way while helping to manage enterprise taxonomies. The solution can automatically translate between taxonomies of two different systems or between an old taxonomy and a new taxonomy. It also suggests additions to existing taxonomies and can propose entirely new IBM FileNet P8 classification schemas. IBM Classification Module currently supports language processing and identification in languages, including most Western European languages, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. IBM Classification Module offering for IBM FileNet P8 and IBM Classification Module for OmniFind Discovery Edition are currently available from IBM and IBM Business Partners.

IBM has also announced free technical resources to help insurance companies better access, integrate and manage ACORD standards-based XML data across the enterprise. Database administrators and software developers running IBM DB2 9 data server software can view an interactive demo and download a new DB2 pureXML industry bundle that includes scripts and examples at no charge to begin managing both conventional relational data and ACORD XML messages without having to reformat the XML data for consumption outside of the database. Application developers can download the DB2 pureXML industry bundles and use an interactive demo by visiting the IBM alphaWorks portal. The demo contains Feeds, RESTful services (Web 2.0), XFORMS and web services, and can be accessed through web browsers, feed readers, XFORMS viewers, custom clients, and mashups.

(www.ibm.com; www.acord.org; www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/purexml)  

EMC has released two enterprise content management (ECM) solutions engineered to provide seamless integration between EMC Documentum software and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. EMC says the new SharePoint offerings provide a single source for integrated ECM capabilities that enable archiving, records management, business process management, imaging and classification.

EMC Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint software gives customers access to an enterprise infrastructure for centralized control of content that has been created and managed in SharePoint Server 2007. The other solution, Content Services for SharePoint, is a set of ASP.Net Web Parts, allowing access to the Documentum Content Server through the SharePoint Server 2007 interface.

Content Services for SharePoint software exposes key Documentum functionality in the SharePoint Server 2007 interface, including the ability to:

• search for content across the Documentum repository, and monitor and subscribe to critical documents;
• direct access to the Documentum Inbox, QuickFlows and the Business Process Management System; and
• manage document life cycles and support virtual documents.

• archive based on metadata or events;
• leverage shortcuts, which archive content to Documentum while leaving a link behind in SharePoint Server 2007;
• utilize mass transfer capabilities to move documents from SharePoint Server 2007 to Documentum; and
• transfer content from SharePoint Server 2007 to Documentum while retaining all rich document properties and metadata.

Italian firm Expert System has released Cogito SIMS (semantic intelligent management system). Cogito is said to streamline the development of applications to understand, discover and classify information contained in unstructured text, as well as to review, normalize and automatically enhance metadata--through the extraction of named entities, relations and event-related data trapped in text.

Expert System has also released the Cogito SIMS software development kit, which is targeted at OEM customers and system integrators. The company claims it's simple to use and reports it includes a declarative language and intuitive user interface to enable programmers who do not possess extensive computational or linguistic experience to develop advanced search, categorization and text analysis applications.

Visual Sciences (formerly known as WebSideStory) has launched HBX Analytics 4.0, as well as Technology Platform 5. The company reports the latest version of HBX delivers expanded e-commerce–related capabilities, including the ability to actively segment e-commerce order data, analyze product placement and report on multiple storefronts within one account. Further, it says, HBX Visual Workstation is now available as a new interface for historical and ongoing data collected by HBX Analytics, providing custom reporting, ad hoc analysis and industry-recognized interactive data visualization capabilities.

Visual Sciences’ Technology Platform 5 is described as a tera-scale, real-time analytics platform that serves as the foundation for Visual Sciences’ analytics applications, including Visual Site and Visual Call, and is also used by Visual Sciences’ clients to quickly deploy real-time analytics solutions tailored to their own requirements. Visual Sciences says Technology Platform 5 adds significant new features and benefits to its real-time analytics application platform, which include:

Performance. Platform 5 installations will typically experience a two to eight times improvement in query speeds over Platform 4.

Usability. Version 5 has added multilingual support and can display any foreign language.

Scalability. The new software leverages 64-bit hardware and also remains available in a 32-bit server version.

Granularity. Even the largest data dimensions can be loaded without truncation or loss.

Flexibility. Administrators can quickly and easily design visualizations with their own data schemas.

Google Inc. has announced its first steps toward a universal search model that will offer users a more integrated way to search for and view information online. The company also introduced an updated homepage design and several new navigation features.

The company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources--including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites--into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users may recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results. Google is also in the process of deploying a new technical infrastructure designed to enable the search engine to handle the tasks required to produce universal search results. The company is also releasing the first stage of an upgraded ranking mechanism that automatically and objectively compares different types of information.

New dynamically generated navigation links have been added above the search results to suggest additional information that is relevant to a user’s query. Google’s homepage and a number of applications have also been updated with a new navigation bar to provide access to Google products. Users will see a navigation bar on the top left side of the page with various Google search properties and products including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Picasa Web Albums.

(www.google.com)  

Mark Logic Corporation has announced the general availability of MarkLogic Sever 3.2, the newest version of its XML content server. It includes new features that provide expanded content processing capabilities, more sophisticated content search and analysis, and enhanced support for administrators and developers.

MarkLogic Server 3.2 new features and capabilities include: expanded content processing capabilities, where MarkLogic includes advanced language support, including stemming and tokenization, for selected European, Middle Eastern, and Asian languages, specifically French, Italian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, and Russian. MarkLogic also includes enhanced support for content in common document formats including Microsoft Office 2007 and Open Office; improved content search features, such as more precise content search, designed to enable developers to build custom indices on specific elements; new content analysis capabilities, where MarkLogic offers frequency analysis of elements and collections helping organizations to perform more detailed analysis of their content. In addition, it is designed to enable organizations to categorize their search results; additional administration support, where MarkLogic brings enhanced functionality to administrators who are tasked with maintaining the XML content server as part of the overall information technology (IT) infrastructure. It includes monitoring application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling IT administrators to tie into enterprise system monitoring tools to gain enhanced visibility, and access to all areas of the deployment. A new cancel query API allows administrators to programmatically stop a query in process; and increased support for developers. The new release includes an API designed to enable partners to integrate their integrated development environment (IDE) tools with MarkLogic Server.

(www.marklogic.com)  

Pixsy Corporation, a media search platform that powers private label image and video search engines, has partnered with iStockphoto. iStock is a stock imagery and video site. Under the terms of the agreement, Pixsy’s Proprietary Media Search Platform will index thumbnails of iStock’s collection. Pixsy customers can search on Pixsy.com, and, if they wish, purchase the desired imagery directly from iStock. All of iStock’s 1.7 million images and videos can be found via Pixsy, and Pixsy will automatically receive several thousand new images and videos added to the iStock collection every week. Pixsy has also selected iStock as one of the company’s top 10 content providers inside PixsyPower. PixsyPower is a suite of media search tools and widgets for website publishers of all sizes. This joint partnership is designed to drive traffic to iStockphoto.com and result in additional qualified traffic from the Pixsy Network.

(www.istockphoto.com; www.pixsy.com)

SearchInform Technologies Inc. has released a new version of SearchInform, a corporate system of full text search and search for documents with similar content in large data volumes. The new version supports web-interface, a feature that will be particularly applicable in the corporate field. Users don’t need to install any additional software on client computers, instead they can connect to the search server using web-browser. This also rids users of all limitations affiliated to binding the client versions of SearchInform to a particular computer. With web interface, SearchInform offers functions which allow users to set client access to SearchInform search server via internet. When accessing the server through the internet, the system of user access rights differentiation as set in domain security policies applies. The Windows platform is required only for the search server, while client workstations can be equipped with other operation systems. Regardless of different OS’s, clients can connect to the server, send their search queries, and get results.

(www.searchinform.com)  

MetaCarta, a provider of geographic search solutions, today announced a partnership with Clickability, which offers on-demand Web content management software.

The deal calls for MetaCarta's Geographic Text Search (GTS) technology to expand Clickability's platform, by adding geographic relevancy to a publisher's content, enabling publishers to localize, personalize and monetize content.

MetaCarta explains that its GTS technology, which identifies implied and explicit references to geographic locations within documents, indexes the document, assigns latitude/longitude coordinates to the references and display them on a map, will be offered to Clickability customers using its on-demand cmPublish content management platform.

Business Objects has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Inxight Software for an as-yet undisclosed amount. The companies say the combination of offerings will provide organizations with a comprehensive BI solution and streamlined access to both structured information within databases and data warehouses, as well as unstructured information such as e-mails, documents, notes fields and Web content.

Business Objects reports it's trying to break down the barriers to full spectrum BI and deliver a solution that natively combines both structured and unstructured data across all areas of business intelligence–from enterprise information management to information discovery and delivery to performance management.

Inxight’s suite of products includes search federation; summarization, categorization, and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation; and visualization.