Fusion? No fuss

Factiva introduces Fusion, a content enhancement offering that categorizes and creates relationships between business content sets. The company claims Factiva Fusion resolves the problems associated with inefficient of searching multiple internal and external systems and the challenge of finding relevant information in the myriad of results returned by search engines.

Factiva explains that Fusion allows customers to integrate internal content such as research papers, presentations, proposals and customer records with its news and business information and other external content, including public Web sites. Through this approach, reports Factiva, users manage information overload while ensuring that critical information is not overlooked.

Factiva Fusion structures content for accurate retrieval and contextual integration into portals, intranets and other business applications. Further, says the company, customers can tailor its Intelligent Indexing solution, thus reducing the time needed to create a unique classification scheme. Factiva emphasizes it does not seek to replace existing portals, intranets and content management systems with Fusion, but to complement and enhance their performance by consistently organizing the content within those repositories. Further, with Factiva Fusion developer's kit, companies can create Web services to supply enhanced information that supports specific job functions (e.g., finance, marketing, etc.).

The Factiva Fusion content enhancement process is comprised of the following four interconnected components:

• Discover retrieves a company's internal and external, structured and unstructured content, from multiple sources;

• Normalize converts that content into a consistent XML format;

• Categorize automatically applies a custom taxonomy, based on Factiva Intelligent Indexing across all content; and

• Export presents content for unified searching or downstream XML integration into enterprise applications.