Product Briefing >>

Chiliad Discovery/Alert is a comprehensive platform for all-source decentralized search, on-the-fly analysis and extraction, real-time knowledge fusion, dynamic navigation and instant alerts. Built from the ground up to provide unlimited scalability and to operate in parallel across decentralized repositories of unstructured and structured data, and across different hardware platforms with different operating systems in multiple organizations, Chiliad Discovery/Alert represents a new category of application capable of delivering knowledge fusion across all technical and organizational boundaries. By creating a global, virtual repository across widely distributed data stores, and by delivering the most comprehensive and relevant content, and alerts, Chiliad Discovery/Alert puts the user in the center of the picture, not the data.

 

Chiliad Discovery/Alert puts the user in the center of the picture and delivers knowledge fusion widely distributed data stores.

Architecture for Cooperative Peer-to-Peer Processing

Chiliad’s cooperative peer-to-peer processing architecture allows organizations to distribute instances of the search, indexing and analysis engine in a network of cooperating nodes across local or remote distributed networks. Each instance of the engine on any operating system and hardware platform is an intelligent node among a network of cooperating nodes. With appropriate access permissions, any node can query any combination of other nodes on the fly. Highly optimized network communications ensure that nodes can cooperate with minimal network load.

 

Chiliad's multi-host connectivity layer allows organizations to distribute processing in parallel among federated nodes across local or remote distributed networks .

There are many benefits of this distributed architecture, including:

• Eliminating the need to duplicate document collections on multiple servers
• Because collections don't need to be duplicated, each user can be confident she is searching the most up-to-date information
• High performance even with large collections of documents or records
• Ability to quickly integrate diverse collections across different operating environments
• Ability to analyze data from a wide range of distributed collections simultaneously, which reveals implicit relationships that would otherwise go undetected

Delivering the Best Results with Global Analysis and Ranking

A key advantage of Chiliad’s approach lies the ability to reliably deliver to the user the most relevant information from all of the distributed collections searched, and to detect any explicit or implicit relationships. Chiliad is uniquely capable of achieving this through its cooperative peer-to-peer processing, which analyzes information from all of the participating nodes simultaneously to deliver the best information regardless of where it resides.

 

Less capable systems may approximate this architecture by connecting to multiple instances of their search server deployments. This traditional approach is inherently flawed however because the ranking methods do not allow them to simultaneously analyze all of the available items and accurately select the most relevant documents across all of the available repositories.

Data Access and Security

Chiliad Discovery/Alert can search and analyze across enormous repositories of geographically distributed disparate unstructured and structured data as if all the resources were in a single repository on the user’s own computer. Unlike the typical scenario where users have to log in and authenticate in stovepipe applications, Chiliad Discovery/Alert provides a sophisticated security layer with single sign-on for simultaneous access across all resources that a user is authorized to view. Through integration with U.S. government-certified “trusted guard” systems, Chiliad Discovery/Alert supports information sharing among domains with differing security levels, enabling true “all source, all way” information sharing.

 

Chiliad Discovery/Alert processes documents in several hundred file formats, file systems, messages, data feeds such as RSS, HTML, and relational database management systems. The Discovery/Alert Web Spider can monitor both intranet and Internet web sites. Flexible application programming interfaces (APIs) allow integration with other content repositories.

 

Organizations that have existing investments in search engines, content management systems and databases don’t need to remove or change those applications. Chiliad Discovery/Alert can index content without disrupting those systems, and can even perform analysis on items retrieved from those systems using its “smart federation” capability.

Discovery/Alert Search

Most full-text retrieval systems are optimized for precision at the expense of recall because the underlying technology is not discerning enough to do both and still avoid false positives. Chiliad Discovery/Alert optimizes for both and has been found in objective benchmarks to deliver the highest precision and recall consistently. A wide range of search methods are available, including:

 

• Natural language/probabilistic
• Concept-based
• Boolean and normalized regular expressions
• Proximity
• Synonym-matching
• “Fuzzy” or approximate term matching
• Geo-referenced

 Unlike most search systems, Chiliad Discovery/Alert does not limit searching to a particular “mode” such as Boolean or natural language, but rather allows users to construct a query or an alert using a variety of styles simultaneously and uses the combined criteria to perform the search or analysis.

 

Although users have access to a rich set of search methods, there is no need for end users to learn a search language. An intuitive, interactive Web browser interface guides users as they build and save queries and refine and explore search results. The Web-based interface is ready to use out-of-the-box, but is also customizable, thus allowing each organization to add their own style and identity to the user’s view, and even to modify or add functionality.

 

Bridging the Gap between Structured and Unstructured Data

Traditional search engines treat structured data stored in database management systems as “metadata,” separate from unstructured documents. Chiliad Discovery/Alert can perform search and analysis across both types of data, regardless of location and format, and with no limits on what constitutes a “document.” The ability to weave structured and unstructured content into a continuous fabric of information is a critical step in “connecting the dots.”

Real-Time Filtering and Alerts

Effective contextual filtering is the information processing paradigm that will dominate national security intelligence and business intelligence applications going forward. The Chiliad Discovery/Alert Filtering and Alerting Service is the most comprehensive and scalable system available for tracking and receiving alerts about new data in real time. Filtering agents are similar to queries that are executed against each incoming item; but filtering occurs instantly on new items before indexing to provide the highest performance, scalability and timeliness.

 

The Filtering and Alterting Service can operate in two modes. In batch mode, the system will filter periodically in batch processes against newly acquired of data When seconds count, the software can be configured to filter streaming data instantly as each document or message arrives live over a network. Chiliad's adaptive analysis exploits any new bits of field data within seconds of arrival to enable immediate response.

 

The Chiliad filtering engine makes use of the entire range of search, analysis, and selection capabilities of the Discovery/Alert platform for ranking and thresholding, as well as distributed ad-hoc analysis across distributed networks, thus assuring users that important items will not be missed, and that “false positives” will be eliminated. Most other available full-text filtering engines are fundamentally Boolean by design and rely on overly constrained filtering to reduce false positives, resulting in missed documents.

 

Filtering agents can include a relevance threshold, which specifies the relevance level that is required before an actual alert is generated. Users may choose immediate notification, periodic updates (such as daily or weekly), and also view Alerts in the Discovery/Alert client application.

On-the-Fly Dynamic Concept Analysis

Chiliad Discovery/Alert performs sophisticated on-the-fly analysis both at the document and sub-document level to mine textual content for concepts, using the user’s query context to focus the analysis. In contrast, most search and concept mining products identify concepts in text only at indexing time, and many rely on static or pre-built concept maps.

 

Concepts can include key phrases, or might take the form of entities such as people, places, organizations or telephone numbers. Out-of-the-box Chiliad Discovery/Alert recognizes more than 20 different types of concepts and entities, and the system is extensible so new concept “recognizers” can be added at any time. With extensible on-the-fly concept recognition, organizations can fine tune and adapt their systems over time without the overhead of re-indexing.  

Automatic Knowledge Acquisition and Collaboration

As users retrieve, analyze and browse documents, Chiliad Discovery/Alert can optionally log and track the knowledge that each user has accessed. This information can be used to identify experiential experts and individuals with whom to exchange tacit information. This capability can be combined with Filtering Agents to monitor network traffic, and also used for counterintelligence.

 

Navigation and Visualization

Chiliad Discovery/Alert offers a variety of navigation styles to allow users to view and browse search results, extracted concepts and entities, structured data and knowledge maps.

Discover Knowledge

The concepts yielded by dynamic concept analysis can be used to construct a hierarchical “knowledge map” that users can browse and explore. This conceptual navigation is not only extremely efficient for finding information about a specific topic, but also leads to the ultimate objective of knowledge discovery—uncovering previously unknown connections. As users refine and sharpen their focus during a query session, Discovery Knowledge creates a dynamic knowledge map for the user at each step, allowing users to navigate the knowledge space.

 

Finally, the ability to utilize Discover Knowledge seamlessly across isolated “stovepipe” systems yields some of the highest value results.  [Screen shot]

Faceted Navigation

Discovery/Alert Faceted Navigation provides the ability to rapidly “slice and dice” documents and other records based on facets of information. For example, a manager searching a database of resumes for candidates to staff a project might start her search by retrieving all of the Java programmers in the system. She might then use faceted navigation to explore and analyze the result set, experimenting with different “facets” of the candidates such as years of experience, location, security clearance, current assignment status, willingness to travel, etc. Typically, each of these qualifiers would reduce the set of candidates further; in fact, there might be only one “perfect” candidate in the system.

 

Faceted navigation gives the manager the ability to quickly and interactively see how each qualifier affects the set of potential candidates. Like other Chiliad Discovery/Alert operations, faceted navigation takes full advantage of distributed architecture to enable browsing and analysis across all selected repositories.

 

Visualization Tools

Chiliad Discovery/Alert is integrated with a variety of commercial visualization, mapping and analysis tools, including ESRI and i2/ChoicePoint. Rich Java and XML based interfaces provide the tools custom integrations by customers, partners or Chiliad professional services staff.

 

Discovery/Alert Geospatial Service

Location is a powerful organizing concept for information. The Discovery/Alert Geospatial Service leverages this power by providing the ability to display data such as entities and search results on a map. This service uses location information extracted from unstructured or structured content such as city, state or zip code, enabling users to see geographic information in a graphical way to help see patterns or make connections that might not otherwise be obvious. An embedded geocoder module can assign latitude/longitude properties to geographic entities and other items so that those items, and/or the documents in which they were referenced, can be displayed in a variety of geographic map interfaces.

 

Integration Capabilities

Chiliad Discovery/Alert provides a full complement of tools to customize and integrate its context analysis and knowledge discovery software capabilities with other products. Available tools range from simple modifiable templates to XML data exchange formats to a Java API. With these tools end customers, systems integrators and Chiliad Professional Services can integrate and embed complementary software products into Chiliad's knowledge discovery system or embed Chiliad's software into other software products. A JSR-168 compliant interface provides integration with portals. Inquire about existing integrations with visualization, geospatial, file translation and portal software.