Digital Archaeology Creates Discovery Suite
ACTION ITEMS
Jon Cornetto has reported the following in InfoWorld: Imagine using the sum total of the Internet's text and information as one giant data warehouse that you can manipulate, reorganize, and build advanced queries on top of -- revealing deep and meaningful relationships in the data. This is the vision of Digital Archaeology (DA), a company that hopes to revolutionize data warehousing and knowledge management.
The company has developed an "adaptive software architecture," based on relational calculus, that allows for the processing of disparate structured or unstructured data, said Peter Lord, DA's vice president of marketing. The product lets users work outside the bounds of how the data was originally structured.
"This relationship-oriented structure, based on expanded-set theory [X-Set], is incredibly powerful. It allows you to manage an extended data set where there was no conception, or any preconception, that this data would ever be used together," said John Voeller, chief technology officer and senior partner at Black and Veatch, a Kansas City, Mo.-based engineering company that develops solutions for nuclear and fossil-fuel-based utilities.
The first application of this new technology, a "knowledge discovery" application called DA Discovery Suite, will be launched in the fourth quarter, Lord said. Discovery Suite will consist of a warehouse construction tool that will let users "congeal" inconsistent multiple corporate data resources into a cross-consistent data set.
"This tool creates spontaneous data tables," Voeller said. "And then I can slice away at [them] from totally different directions than the data was designed to deal with." The suite will also include a free lightweight query tool, called Explorer, and an advanced data-mining tool called Excavator.
"The X-Set theory will let these guys take this next step," Voeller said. "They want to zip up perhaps the largest extended set -- the Web. " Digital Archaeology, in Lenexa, Kan., can be reached at http://www.digarch.com