IsoQuest, Inc.: NetOwlTM Server

1. Introduction NetOwl TM Server is a powerful text analysis software product developed by IsoQuest, Inc. It supports business intelligence by providing fast and easy access to information stored on local Intranets and the global Internet. It organizes, analyzes, and summarizes data extracted by NameTag TM and any Full-Text search engine. It then presents the data for either searching or browsing. NameTag is a data extraction and indexing tool that finds proper names and other defined entities within an input text stream. NetOwl is the total application built on the NameTag core engine. NetOwl tags each desired document or Web page by person, organization, location, relationship and description giving you a browsable "back-of-the-book index.'" This allows for targeting exactly key information that is sought. With NetOwl it is no longer necessary to scroll through massive amounts of text to find exacdy what is useful. NetOwl is a server-based program which generates standard CGI commands that can be executed by any standard Web browser. NetOwl's Loader ingests documents from any text or HTML-based data source, sequentially loads the documents, then passes them on to NameTag and the full-text search engine for data extraction. The full-text search engine data is stored in a proprietary database while NameTag's exlracted data is stored in any ODBC-compliant database. There are two major functional areas of the NetOwl system. The NetOwl Server system consists off • Loader • Full-Text Search • NameTag • Database interface • Client The second NetOwl functional area comprises customization, maintenance and monitoring tools which provide support to the underlying processes of NetOwl: • NetOwl Administrator Tool • NetOwl Service Manager Both major areas use the relational database for information storage and retrieval. This is the only link to each of the functional areas (i.e., all common information is accessed from the central database). The major functional areas never talk direcdy to each other or require or pass information between each other. Loader The Loader component of the NetOwl server collects information to process (by crawling specified sites, USENET news groups and/or locally accessible files) and then creates an index of that data in the NetOwl database. documents from the loader and creates an index of all relevant words. The index thus created can later be searched by the client component to provide a list of relevant documents given a set of keywords. Database The Database component stores the index information generated …