Mapping metadata

Siderean Software (www.siderean.com) has announced a highly scalable product and services solution for extracting and aligning metadata from large amounts of unstructured and structured data based on the IBM Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA).

Siderean says the new Seamark Metadata Assembly Process Platform (MAPP) improves digital content navigation capabilities by expanding and enriching available metadata so the company's flagship semantic-navigation offering, Seamark Navigator, can present a more accurate and complete scope of available content and context for accessing information.

Seamark Navigator offers a harvesting back end for accessing and generating metadata prior to loading it into its store. The existing harvester is best suited for applications where the metadata is reasonably evolved and well-organized outside Seamark Navigator, requiring little transformation and processing before incorporating the feed into the store. For more complex environments, where large volumes of diverse and unorganized digital assets must be processed for navigation, a more formalized framework is needed to manage and align the metadata representation to the business. Seamark MAPP can semantically align acquired metadata through a process framework that offers enterprise scale. The new solution is said to uniquely combine the richness of the semantic Web with existing Web services and UIMA standards.

Siderean describes MAPP as an easy-to-use, configurable, scalable and flexible framework for generating and analyzing metadata from diverse sources including file systems, content management solutions, databases, Web pages, RSS feeds and blogs. Customers with a large volume of those kinds of unstructured assets will use Seamark MAPP to organize information at sufficient depth to deliver high-value navigational applications in many applicable business domains including market and competitive intelligence, 360-degree customer views and risk management.

Seamark MAPP features include:

• a process-oriented framework for collecting, extracting and organizing metadata before feeding it into Seamark Navigator;
• an architecture built on IBM's UIMA standard providing industrial strength and scalability for large enterprises;
• out-of-the-box adapters for Microsoft SharePoint, RSS, Web and file system access (additional adapters are expected to be available in 2006);
• a built-in metadata extraction tool as well as plug-in support for third party UIMA-compatible products; and
• a formal process for incorporating business rules for analytics.