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InfoSphere |
Details: |
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Published by InfoSphere
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Written by Magnus Stensmo and Mikael Thorson |
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Title:
Unstructured Information Management - Search Report from InfoSphere
Review:
Don't be put off by the title of this review. The subtitle to this 110
page report is "An overview of the Enterprise Search, Text Analysis
and Visualization Market" and if I were a lazy reviewer I'd stop at
this point and recommend that any one involved in selecting a search
engine or related product ought to buy a copy of this report at the
earliest opportunity.
However, FreePint insist that they need 500 words for a review, so
here are another 440. The report is published by the Swedish
consultancy Infosphere AB <http://www.infosphere.se> and I doubt that
you will have heard of them. The company offers risk and opportunity
assessments, strategy consulting, knowledge technology consulting and
political risk services. Infosphere is based in Stockholm and was
founded in 1999 (the same year as my company, Intranet Focus - a good
year!). The authors of this report, Magnus Stensmo and Mikael Thorson,
both come from research groups at IBM working on retrieval and
knowledge management, and it shows in the very high level of analysis
that they provide on the technology of search, and on the search
industry.
The report has three main sections. The first is an introduction to
the problems of searching unstructured information, useful to give to
managers who regard Google as the only search engine worth talking
about. This is followed by an overview of the main functionalities of
search, analysis, categorisation and visualization products, which is
easy to understand by readers without a background in information
science. In the final section, the authors profile 40 vendors of
search, text analysis and visualisation software. Note, however, that
this report is about enterprise search, and not public Web search.
For each company there is a very useful one-page summary that sets out
the products and technology they offer, financial information and an
over SWOT-style assessment of the vendor. There are also a number of
comparison charts for the search and retrieval, information
extraction, categorisation, clustering, taxonomy management and
visualisation sectors.
There is simply no other source of this information. Even the major IT
market analysts (such as Forrester and IDC) do not go into this level
of detail. In addition, the report is well written, can be understood
without any IT knowledge (the emphasis is on what the products do, not
how they do it) and is elegant enough to be presented to a senior
manager when the time comes to ask for budget. And the budget required
for this report is 295 Euros or US$325. The report can be ordered and
downloaded as a PDF from the Infosphere Web site
<http://www.infosphere.se/extra/news/?module_instance=2&id=31>.
To complement the report, the company has also set up a weblog at
<http://www.unstruct.org> which, in effect, updates the report and
also provides a forum for news and views on the unstructured
information management market.
There are some missing vendors, notably Mondosoft and Isys-Odessey,
and there is little discussion of multi-lingual retrieval. I would
also like to have seen more on IT platform requirements. But these are
small concerns and I have no hesitation in recommending this report to
any organisation trying to make sense of enterprise search.
Read a sample section of this report and purchase it online at:
<http://www.infosphere.se/extra/news/?module_instance=2&id=31>
Free Pint Reviewer:
Martin White is Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd.,
<http://www.intranetfocus.com> which he established in 1999. Martin
consults on the design and management of intranets and extranets, and
the specification and selection of content management systems. He is a
member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of
Information Management and since 2001 has written a monthly column on
intranet management issues for the US magazine EContent
<http://www.econtentmag.com>.
He is a Visiting Professor at the
Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield and is a
member of the Advisory Board of the CMS Evaluation Laboratory at the
iSchool, University of Washington, USA.
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