Besting the breeds

Stratify announces an agreement with Inktomi under which it will offer joint customers a scalable, integrated categorized search solution for the enterprise. Further, Inktomi will resell Stratify's new offering, its Discovery System for Inktomi Enterprise Search through its worldwide sales force. Combining Inktomi's search capabilities with Stratify's leading hierarchy management and text categorization platform will give customers and organized, unified and accurate view of information enterprisewide, the companies say.

Stratify says its new Discovery System is a categorization solution optimized for Inktomi search technology that delivers fast and intuitive direct navigation of sophisticated topic hierarchies. It adds that because the search results are organized by topics and provides a browsable topic hierarchy, the Stratify Discovery System for Inktomi Enterprise Search provides increased search precision and information retrieval efficiency.

Features of the Stratify Discovery System for Inktomi Enterprise Search include:

Advanced categorization. Stratify says the offering increases search precision by organizing search results automatically into familiar topics relevant to an organization's business, enabling users to easily resolve ambiguous search terms and efficiently access pertinent information. Additionally, it provides a topic hierarchy for intuitive navigation, empowering users to leverage implicit, fine-grained relationships between documents and discover entire topics of relevant information. The system also enables users to drill down to documents within topics, allowing discovery of contextually related documents without need for complex Boolean queries.

Scalable categorization infrastructure. The company says its software creates or imports topic hierarchies automatically, eliminating manual document tagging or hierarchy development and reducing time required to develop detailed hierarchies by up to 97%. Further, Stratify explains, it classifies documents using multiple classifiers (statistical, Boolean, keyword, URL) so that documents from different sources are classified consistently and accurately. The Discovery Systems is also said to deliver a scalable architecture that generates hierarchies containing thousands of topics and classifies millions of documents, enabling enterprise-wide implementations with minimum effort.

Comprehensive management tools. Stratify explains that the Inktomi offering combines automation with human review and control, ensuring topic hierarchies and document categorizations remain relevant to changing business conditions. The company also claims it provides report insights into the categorization process, enabling users to easily adjust classification models and focus only on areas of the hierarchy that need attention.

Seamless integration. Finally, Stratify says, its offering classifies 200-plus document formats, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Office formats, HTML, e-mail, and ASCII. Access to information is achieved by using pre-built repository bridges, including content and document management systems, relational databases, Web-based content (including password protected sites), Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. The company claims it also integrates easily into existing IT environments with APIs that adhere to and support industry standards, such as HTTP, XML, SOAP and WSDL.