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Sourcier: A New Exalabs ‘Geo-Search’ Demo

October 20th, 2009 by Market'&Co Exalabs, New products & features 0
More Mappable Data, and Map-Hungry Users
More and more information on the Internet is ‘mappable’:
- The physical addresses of offices or stores
- Wikipedia articles (country/city info, geo-science articles, etc.)
- Photos and videos with content of local interest on “Web 2.0” content-sharing sites
- POI (Point Of Interest) services like tourism portals (attractions, hotels, etc.)
Naturally enough, numerous services have recently appeared allowing Net surfers to view search results on a map, bridging the gap between the ‘real world’ and Web content. No longer satisfied with viewing mappable information presented in an old-fashioned laundry list of search results, users today are hungry to search for information within and through a map. And Exalead is eager to join users in exploring the boundaries of map-based search. We’ve therefore added a new geo-spatial search demo, Sourcier, to our Exalabs site.

Map-Based Search with Exalead
Sourcier was produced in collaboration with France’s leading public earth science institution, BRGM (Bureau of Geological and Mining Research). It provides map-centered search for metropolitan France groundwater resources using publicly available data from the ADES site.

Sourcier enables users to search water resources and water-related points of interest (along with associated scientific data) according to:
- A chemical component, environmental factor, or micro-biological element
- A concentration range
- A time period
- A geographical area, by navigating the map using drawing tools, or specifying an administrative area (region, county or municipality)
Results are displayed directly on the map along with markers for exploring related data in a graphical form.

To Come…
Forthcoming indexation and geo-search experiments using Exalead technology will involve support for more complex geometric objects and distance calculations to support extrapolation to different geometric shapes (for example, using a specified radius to manipulate maximum distance).

The indexation of geometric objects such as polygons would permit one, for example, to search London parks and reuse their geo-spatial ‘fingerprints’ on the map as search criteria, and to retrieve related Web data like geo-tagged photos or videos.

Sourcier is available at: http://sourcier.labs.exalead.com/

(Note: the service is currently available in French.)
Social CRM and Constellations

October 14th, 2009 by Market'&Co Kudos, New products & features, Powered by Exalead, Technology 0

It’s been an interesting week further exploring the topic of Social Networking and Customer Service. Having a background in database, BI and now search technologies, I have been through my fair share of hype cycles, so am working on getting a better sense of the current state of the application and technology space. It is little surprise that Gartner places Social CRM: Customer Service at the peak of the hype cycle for Social Software (2009) with 2 to 5 years lead time to mainstream adoption and the related Social CRM: Community Marketing as on the rise with 5 to 10 years to mainstream adoption.

There is certainly no shortage of debate on the definition, scope and relative viability of social CRM (SCRM). Check out Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad? by Bob Thompson, for a recent opinion and some cross references to others’ thoughts. It’s clear that interest and momentum is high but plenty of room remains for clarification. I, for one, would like to see more in the way of reference use cases across CRM and adjacent functions to better understand processes, data usage and interdependencies. I just can’t imagine adoption hitting stride until companies can see how functional pieces and related data need fit together. All you have to do is take a look at Gartner’s rather crowded Social Software hype cycle to get a sense of potential process and data overlaps and the accompanying urge to tap the breaks a bit. Paul Greenberg, a regular contributor to ZDNet, promises more discussion on related business models and strategies..

We see that companies are beginning to get a sense of the social conversations that involve their products and services. A subset of those companies is having direct conversations with customers through social media channels. For example, one of my good friends does PR for a video game company and is crushed by the need to address misinformation and negative sentiment and to bring some control to the conversation about his clients. We look forward to going beyond the hype – seeing more examples of how companies are really building the processes and technologies around social CRM.

At Exalead, we’re working on Social CRM related technologies. Constellations is an Exalead Labs experiment that looks at connections between people and between web sites. It presents a graph of related Web sites or people. The experiment is built upon our Web index. The approach to relating people and things is flexible and can be based upon a configurable set of factors.
Exalead Desktop: Already Compatible with Windows 7

October 12th, 2009 by Market'&Co Products, Releases 3

Windows 7, the newest version of Microsoft Windows, is scheduled to hit the shelves October 22. Worried about how your favorite desktop search application will function if you upgrade? No need to panic! Exalead Desktop is already functional with Windows 7!
ACM Multimedia 2009, Multimedia Grand Challenge: Here We Come!

October 7th, 2009 by Market'&Co Kudos 0

Exalead is proud to announce that its ExaLabs Web application Voxalead News has been chosen as a finalist for this year’s Multimedia Grand Challenge in the category of Video Segmentation. This challenge is part of ACM Multimedia Conference, the biggest scientific conference on multimedia applications and will take place in Beijing between October 19th and 24th.

Voxalead News, previously known as Voxalead, is a Web application that enables you to search for text within videos so you can gain a wide panorama of what is said about a topic in the news. It uses a Speech-to-Text transcription module from LIMSI (IT Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, an entity of CNRS) to transcribe speeches.

As usual in this type of competition, there are many challengers. All categories included, there are 14 of finalists this year that will promote their application with a 3min-speech a the conference. Let’s encourage and wish good luck to Julien who will champion Voxalead News in Beijing!

Click here for the details of Yahoo’s Challenge on Video Segmentation and view the complete list of finalists.

By the way, don’t forget to try out Voxalead News at voxalead.labs.exalead.com !

Stay tuned…
Databases vs. Search Engines: The Space Locality Bottleneck

October 5th, 2009 by François Technology 9

So far, the only solution proposed by database vendors to provide acceptable performance on a large volume of information is to improve the performance of the underlying hardware. In-memory databases like Oracle TimesTen or DB2 SolidDB require huge amounts of physical memory. Datawarehouse appliances like TeraData or Netezza rely on specialised hardware coprocessors. And most recently, as Steve Arnolds points out in his blog, Oracle itself admits that the acquisition of Sun will allow them to build more powerful “systems” by combining Sun’s high-end hardware with Oracle’s database platform.

At Exalead, we believe that Search-Based Applications, or SBAs, are another (I could say more “sustainable”) solution to this problem. The key to efficiently handling large amounts of data is to make sure that data access has a strong “Spatial Locality“. Quoting Wikipedia, achieving spatial locality means that “if a particular memory location is referenced at a particular time, then it is likely that nearby memory locations will be referenced in the near future.” The main problem with relational databases is that they have very poor spatial locality, because the objects they store are spread across a large number of different tables. High-end CRM or ERP solutions typically store their data on as many as 65,000 different tables, each table being stored at a different disk location. Imagine how many different disk locations the system needs to touch just to display information about a customer or a product on a call center agent’s screen, or to produce a complex BI report. Poor spatial locality leads to huge requirements for disk access, which is the main performance bottleneck for databases today.

SBAs are built on a very different data model, centered around the notion of a “business item”. A “business item” is a self-contained object corresponding to a “real-life” entity that is manipulated by the application and understood by the end-users. For example, in a CRM application, business items would be the Contacts, Opportunities and Leads that are viewed by the business users. Unlike applications built using a relational data model, a business item-centric storage strategy allows for great data spatial locality, since the pieces of information required to answer complex, multi-criteria search queries are all part of a single business item type, and hence stored close to each other on a disk. The performance gap between this local approach and the spread-out relational data model grows exponentially wider as the amount of information applications need to store increases.
Channel Searching for improved customer service

September 25th, 2009 by Market'&Co Kudos 0

At Exalead, we are now seeing uses for search-based applications (SBAs) across many different industry sectors and enterprise departments. SBAs that have been a hot bed for Exalead are customer service-oriented applications. Recent Exalead customers have implemented SBAs within Contact Centers and also for direct use by customers (customer self-service applications).

With that in mind, I recently came across a blog on the movement of customer service towards the use of social media. Linda Evans’ entry on “Customer Service in Social Media” in particular comes to mind. What really resonates with me is the importance of companies monitoring their name in the social media space in order to be fully engaged with their customer base. It seems that the underlying challenge is how to be fully tapped in. Indeed, having a customer service Twitter channel makes a lot of sense, as does a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But what about the next popular channel and the next … And, how in the context of customer service, does this get pulled together as a full and cohesive view of and conversation with the customer?

Well, yes, I do have an opinion on this, and now it’s even stronger. To maintain a 360-degree view of the company as well as its customers and competitors, channel searching needs to be both adaptive and efficient. To be truly meaningful, the result of channel searching also needs to be up-to-date and presented in a unified fashion that makes sense. Search technologies are key to enabling a company’s customer service strategy and infrastructure to adaptively find, tap into and assimilate all sources of relevant information—including social media.
Our Customers Have the Final Say

September 18th, 2009 by Market'&Co Interviews & Commentaries 3

In his latest blog post (European Search Vendor Round Up, September 16, 2009), search expert Stephen Arnold names Exalead as one of the search industry’s most dynamic companies in Europe. It is a welcome recognition from a veteran search analyst who consistently provides technical and financial analysis of actual customer implementations in his research.

Steve makes a very good point, too, concerning the importance of product testing. While expensive to do, we appreciate Steve’s approach of hands-on work with the software products he advocates. There’s nothing like real data to prove a point. Thanks, Steve.
European Trade Show and Conferences of September: Come and Meet us!

September 3rd, 2009 by Market'&Co Events, Showrooms & Conferences 1
In September, Exalead will be present at no less than 3 European events. Whether you are in Berlin, London or Paris, come and meet our team!
- SuMa-eV Forum, Berlin, September 10th
The German “Association for the Promotion of Search Engine Technology and Free Access to Knowledge” holds its 6th meeting on the topic “Information and Knowledge – The Driving Force of the 21st Century?” on September 10th. Exalead will be participating, and François Bourdoncle, Exalead co-founder, will lead a workshop on innovative and alternative new search engine technologies.
Learn More (in German)
- Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2009, London, September 16th and 17th
Exalead is both an exhibitor and sponsor of this summit held by Gartner, one of the most well-known analyst companies in Information Technologies. Do not miss the presentation by Jean-François Gaucheron from AFP (Agence France Presse), an Exalead customer, on Thursday 17th.
Learn More | Subscribe
- Conference Décisionnel CIO – LeMonde Informatique, Paris,
  September 22nd
This free meeting is for CIOs and Project Managers only. It will be held on the morning of September 22nd at Hôtel Prince de Galles.
Learn More | Subscribe (in French)
Discover more events in which Exalead will be participating
KMWorld names Exalead CloudView™ a Trend Setting Product of 2009

August 26th, 2009 by Market'&Co News 0

After being nominated for the past four consecutive years as one of KMWorld’s Trend Setting Products, Exalead Cloudview™ has made the final list yet again.

The judging panel was composed of editorial members at KMWorld, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users. They assessed more than 800 products and selected those demonstrating visible technology breakthroughs that fulfill the challenges and needs of both vendors and customers.

The complete list of award winners will be featured in the KMWorld’s September 2009 issue and then in its online version.

About KMWorld
KMWorld is the leading information provider serving the Knowledge Management systems market. The publication covers the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management by informing its more than 50,000 subscribers about the components and processes, and subsequent success stories that together offer solutions to improve business performance. KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.
Exalead backs innovation

August 7th, 2009 by Market'&Co News 0

Last April, Exalead paved the road towards innovation by becoming the Entrepreneurial partner of the Erasmus Mundus European project, a co-operation and mobility program which promotes Research and Development in the European Union.

Exalead has backed the creation of a new Master’s Program in “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” (EMM-DMKM). According to MIT’s analysts, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery have been recognized as emerging technologies that will change the world.

Students from all over the world who have a Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics or Statistics could be enrolled in the Master’s Program from September 2010, in 6 different universities located in 4 countries: France (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Lyon 2, Polytech’Nantes graduate school of engineering), Italy (the University of West Piedmont, Turin), Romania (The Polytehnica University of Bucharest), and Spain (the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona).

The Master’s program is very unique because the courses are both devoted to Marketing and also to Development with courses like Human/Computer Interfaces or Web/Social Networks/Association/Text/Multimedia Mining.

The program has been selected and awarded by the European Committee, and it’s recognized and certified EMM-DMKM as a Master of Excellence at the European level. It will remain a unique Erasmus Mundus program in Europe focused on the topic of “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” and specific funding and scholarships will be assigned to the best “non-European” students who apply to the Master’s Program.

For those who want more information about the Master’s Program in Data Mining and Knowledge Management, it’s here.

3ds.com

Beyond PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), Dassault Systèmes, the 3D Experience Company, provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations. 3DSWYM, 3DVIA, CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, EXALEAD, NETVIBES, SIMULIA and SOLIDWORKS are registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries.