We are occassionally asked “What is so special about illumin8?” Here’s an example of some of the magic operating behind the scenes of a typical illumin8 search. Suppose a researcher was investigating the problem of soil erosion. Entering the simple phrase soil erosion in our search box generates a powerful result set with summarized, organized information on relevant products, companies, organizations, authors, and approaches. Quite a bit can be gleaned from just this initial summary overview. And selecting one of the solutions, such as “grass”, lets us see a set of records discussing the use of grass to solve soil erosion. Seems simple, but there is more to this than meets the eye.

First, the user has only entered the phrase soil erosion in the search box (the word “grass” hasn’t been entered). Second, illumin8 automatically understands that soil erosion is a problem to be solved. It searches its database to find all instances where the phrase occurs in the correct problem context. It then finds entities connected with the problem, for example companies or organizations investigating solutions to soil erosion, approaches to solving soil erosion, etc. Finally it combines the results and places them in the proper category.

Let’s look at a record included in the grass solution.

This is a pretty straightforward semantic match with the query. What is even more interesting though, is that the system automatically finds synonyms to “grass” and fuses the records containing them under the “grass” solution. For example, records containing words like pasture, forage, and forage plants are all automatically discovered and included as part of the “grass” solution set. Here is an example:

I hope you can see the power of this technology. Typical search products would not pinpoint the search term in a specific, meaningful role, nor would they extract entities which connect to the term in an intelligent way. But that is what illumin8 does. And it goes further by summarizing, adding synonyms, etc., The benefit is a richer search which finds the right answers in the least amount of time.

For some fun summertime reading check out IDC’s white paper on the “Digital Universe” (http://www.emc.com/digital_universe). This vendor-sponsored study boldly estimates and forecasts what IDC calls “The Digital Universe” — essentially the total quantity of digital information created, captured and replicated worldwide. It is measured in exabytes (one exabyte= 1 billion gigabytes) and is forecast to grow rapidly, reaching 1,800 exabytes by 2011.The study notes that

The tools are in place–from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web–to tame the digital universe and turn information growth into economic growth.

illumin8 is a good example of a tool designed exactly for this purpose: converting masses of raw content into business value. This is a critical task for those of us in the information industry and it’s not an easy one. As IDC notes: “searching for meaning in the content of unstructured data….is the rocket science of the digital universe”. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.