Lively discovery

Open Text has unveiled a new version of Livelink Discovery Server, a search engine product designed for companies that publish large quantities of customized information, such as lengthy retail or parts catalogs, news and information archives, technical standards documentation or patent data.

Livelink Discovery Server 9.0 allows users to create customized applications to manage large-scale information retrieval challenges. Version 9.0 offers natural language queries, search federation, text analysis, concept mining, result clustering and categorization. Discovery Server is also said to provide the flexibility to add new search features, so users can meet expanding requirements and offer users new tools beyond the standard ranked list of documents in response to a search query. It can also be extended to include searches of Web-based content sources--intranets, extranets and public Web sites.

Livelink Discovery Server integrates with other applications, such as office automation, document image processing and e-mail, and operates with equal functionality across a wide range of platforms. Development tools for Livelink Discovery Server allow customers to create custom desktop and server applications for client/server environments, making it easy to integrate with established business processes. The product can also be scaled to support simultaneous searches from an unlimited number of databases, says Open Text.

Key features of the new software include:

• support for a wide range of formats, including fielded, full-text and uniquely structured information found in bibliographic and copyright materials, information services, books, business directories, operations manuals and technical documents;

• tools to aid in searching and filtering information, including natural language queries, document relevance ranking, and document summarization;

• dynamic clustering of results, concept mining and extraction, and automatic categorization of information based on predefined or user-created taxonomies;

• a Java-based interface, so users can easily find and analyze information;

• real-time updating of information, so that users can search and analyze information while data is being added; and

• features for tracking user activities, generating valuable information for analysis and billing.

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