Leave the excavating to us
Designed to benefit both technical and non-technical users, Connotate Technologies has introduced Web Mining Server 4.0. The company says the new version automatically navigates through Web content, extracts what's important (text, numbers, images) and converts it from HTML into various formats including XML, alerts, database records, Excel spreadsheets and documents. The logic that performs these functions is based on what Connotate calls Information Agents, and Version 4.0 reportedly supports thousands of them. Information Agents can be used to monitor, harvest, mine, aggregate and integrate Web information. They can deliver information to people or to other systems.
Information Agents can literally be created in minutes using a simple GUI interface, says Connotate. Researchers, analysts, aggregators, integrators and information consumers are all empowered to access and collect the information they need. The company further explains the ease of use and rapid deployment is made possible by machine learning/pattern recognition technology developed at Rutgers University.
Among the many new features are:
Database mapping — Information Agents can be configured to transform unstructured Web data into structured information and then place this structured information into a database. The entire configuration process is GUI-based requiring no programming skills, which makes it beneficial for research, business intelligence, aggregation and integration.
Individual Web page "snapshot" capabilities — Version 4.0 delivers entire HTML pages to users or databases when select information on a given page changes. That is valuable for business intelligence monitoring, archival of frequently changed pages and capturing audit information.
Enhanced Web services/API interface — Information Agents can be invoked programmatically through a standard Web services API. Parameters, keywords and agent logic can all be dynamically specified by the calling program.
Site navigation optimization — Enhanced algorithms provide efficient navigation and interaction with Web sites. Additionally, processing rates can be dynamically adjusted to meet particular goals. This results in higher throughput and quicker delivery of time-sensitive information.
Portable agents — Once created, an agent may be moved to other systems through an import/export process. This allows the sharing of agents by multiple parties.