Search and Discovery in the Post-Cold War Era

David Schatsky | January 22, 2003, 05:29 PM

I just saw a demo by ClearForest, a company that provides tools for analyzing unstructured textual information. It's truly amazing, and truly the search tool for the post-Cold War era. Rather than requiring laborious effort to construct taxonomies by hand (which will inevitably be rigid and quickly become stale), the product enables automatic creation of taxonomies and discovery of relationships. Its semantic analysis capabilities allow for queries such as "Who are the people who have some relationship to anyone who is speaking at a Jupiter conference?" (like the upcoming Jupiter Conent Management Conference .) The technology is naturally very attractive to intelligence agencies, who are today dealing with threats that are structured must less predictably in the past, and who are busy trying to identify the relationships among individuals and organizations that define today's threat to national security. Autonomy--pay attention.