How it works
Figure 1 shows a user issuing a query and analysis request that is processed by multiple instances of Discovery/Alert™ located in four different divisions. The user, who could be physically located anywhere, connects to an accessible instance of Discovery/Alert™ system called a “federator.”
Figure 1
Based on information sources selected by the user or configured by an administrator, the federator system sends the user’s query to any “provider” systems that are accessible and needed to process the request—in this case systems located in divisions C and B. Note that the Discovery/Alert™ node located at Division B functions both as a provider and as a federator, sending the query to the node located at Division D. The availability and even the existence of the node at Division D may be unknown to Division A. Depending on the user’s identity, as well as other factors that can change day-to-day, access to any node, to any specific index on a node, and to any item residing on a node, can be controlled by an administrator with appropriate privileges.
Each of these distributed instances of the Discovery/Alert™ system has access to one or more target “stovepipe” repositories and maintains up-to-date indexes based on data extracted from those repositories. The provider systems accessed in this example could be on the same network or located in different domains and at great distance from one another.
There is no practical limit to the number of Discovery/Alert™ nodes that can be connected in this manner or to the number of different systems whose content can be indexed and searched. Authentication of the user is handled initially by the federator system handling the user’s request and then confirmed at each leaf node where the request is processed.
Figure 2 illustrates Global Knowledge Fusion™, one of the key benefits of the Discovery/Alert™ system.
Figure 2
The Discovery/Alert™ instance at Division A that is acting as the federator in this example manages a fusion process that intelligently ranks and merges the results from each system into a single unified result set (indicated by the red lines). This cooperative distributed processing provides a deep analysis that takes into account items retrieved by all of the participating nodes to ensure that the user receives the most relevant content across all of the distributed resources. The node located at Division B continues to fulfill both the provider and federator roles, managing fusion of items from Division D with the merged result set. Chiliad’s proprietary and patent-pending fusion method ensures that a particular document would be ranked identically regardless of which of the distributed systems it came from. This fusion is performed very efficiently, in real time, with minimal network activity, and without sending a single document or record across the network.
Figure 3 further illustrates the flexibility and true peer-to-peer operation of the Discovery/Alert™ system. In this case there are two queries being processed:
- User 1 (as shown in the previous examples) has submitted a query to the federator node at Division A. That query, shown by the green query path, had been federated to Divisions C and B. Division B in turn federates the query to Division D.
- User 2 connects to a Discovery/Alert™ instance at Division E. The query is sent to multiple providers (indicated by blue lines), among them the system located at Division B, C and D. It is notable that B, C and D are all simultaneously processing the query issued by User 1. Division B, which acts as a provider to B and a federator to D (the “green” query), also performs that role in the query initiated at Division E. In each instance, B manages all of the communication with D.
Figure 3
It should be noted that, while each instance of the Discovery/Alert™ system is capable of functioning as a federator and a provider simultaneously, all of the roles and relationships, including which systems may be accessed as providers, which indexes are exposed to a particular federator, and other characteristics of the system, are under complete control of the administrator, or administrators who control specific servers or domains. In addition, individual nodes may be placed “online” or “offline” by local administrators, subject to organizational governance. This multi-host capability provides complete flexibility in deploying the system across an extended enterprise, as well as across agencies and trading partners.
Think all this looks easy? Well, it is easy to use but the technology to make this happen took over 10 years and $80 million of development, and is the subject of thirteen pending patents!
Select from the features listed to the right
to learn more about Chiliad's Discovery/Alert™.
Peer-to-Peer Architecture
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. Each node may serve as a federator, handling query interaction with a user, and as a provider, executing search requests. With appropriate access permissions, any node can query any combination of other nodes on the fly, and a node can function both as a federator and a provider simultaneously. Highly optimized network communications ensure that nodes can cooperate with minimal network load... read more
Distributed Search
Discovery/Alert™ provides a comprehensive search capability that works seamlessly across large amounts of structured and unstructured data and consistently delivers the quality results you need to connect the dots.
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.” This means that, sooner or later, someone in your organization is going to miss some critically important information. Fortunately, Discovery/Alert™ is optimized for both precision and recall, and has been found in objective benchmarks to deliver the most complete and accurate results consistently... read more
Data Access & Security
Discovery/Alert™ can search and analyze across enormous repositories of geographically distributed 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 each stovepipe application, Discovery/Alert provides a sophisticated security layer with single sign-on for simultaneous access across all of the resources that a user is authorized to view... read more
On-the-Fly Concept & Entity Recognition
Most search and text mining systems extract “entities” such as people, places, organizations and other definable things from unstructured text at the time new items are processed and indexed. Discovery/Alert™ takes a more comprehensive approach and automatically 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. Most importantly, Discovery/Alert™ performs concept recognition dynamically, at query and analysis time, to provide users with the most contextually-relevant concepts focused on the most relevant portion of each document... read more
Filtering & Alerting
Reliable and accurate filtering of new data is of critical importance in both business intelligence and national security. The 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... read more
Discover Knowledge
The Discover Knowledge service is an integral component of the Discovery/Alert™ platform used for navigation and discovery. When a user performs a search or other action that creates a result set, the Discover Knowledge service uses the important, contextually-relevant concepts to construct a hierarchical “knowledge map” for the user to browse and explore. This structure is very efficient for finding information about a specific topic, but more importantly, as the user navigates through the knowledge map, connections among key concepts come into focus more clearly, helping to discover previously unknown connections and to literally connect all the dots... read more
Faceted Navigation
Discovery/Alert™ Faceted Navigation provides the ability to rapidly “slice and dice” documents and other records based on metadata from structured databases or extracted from unstructured documents.
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. With each click on a facet, the result set is reduced until only results that meet all of the requirements are left... read more
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... read more
Integration & Customization
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 rich Java API. With these tools 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... read more
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