Discovery – The Next Evolution of Search
Viziant patent-protected Discovery technologies and products enable users to quickly uncover pertinent information and gain fresh perspectives on massive amounts of data. By making it simple for users to explore information in new ways, we empower organizations to make “out of the box” discoveries that deliver a true competitive edge.

The driving need for Discovery solutions is to gain better decision-making and analysis insight that goes beyond traditional search, text analysis and Business Intelligence ("BI"). Producing intelligent analysis is an iterative process, evaluating and transforming raw data into hypotheses and explanations for a given situation. Discovery delivers powerful brainstorming insight when there are no clear questions or easy answers:

• Find information first seeing what others have missed

• Quickly assess context within large amounts of information

• Explore exceptions, contradictions and suspicious connections

• Collaborate with other users to exchange insights and knowledge

• Provide feedback into the system to increase relevancy with use

• Easy-to-use, intuitive user experience that makes the power of information Discovery accessible to everyone

"This system thinks just like an analyst does. Frame of Reference is a differentiator and real winner when looking for nuggets of information."
Special Assistant to the Science Advisor, NSA


Downloads:
Viziant v1.0 Spec Sheet

Viziant combines cutting edge technologies with a simple, intuitive interface  




 

“What the user sees after they hit the ‘search’ button is just as important as the clever algorithms underneath…. Faceted search is a major area of development for the data analysis business…."
The 451 Group

 

Graphically see how concepts are related across returned content before ever reading a single document  

Viziant: Powerful yet Simple to use Discovery
Viziant Discovery delivers unique insights into problems by enabling users to rapidly and intuitively explore complicated information. Powerful yet simple to use, Viziant guides users to fully discover results, revealing alternative and unforeseen perspectives that would otherwise have been missed.

With Viziant Discovery, an analyst can fully explore initial results through visual cues that guide a drill down, across, or over to different angles. The Frame of Referenceä from which questions are asked and assumptions are posed may broaden or narrow the results as the user tracks down the clues – uncovering valuable insights that remain hidden from other approaches. Every portion of the Viziant solution was designed from the ground up to deliver this flexible, intuitive overall view of information.

Our intuitive interface guides the user to hone their queries with suggested categories and a browseable Knowledge Model, eliminating guesswork. A powerful visual results display shows targeted information in the context of related people, organizations, places, things, and events. And results are highly relevant, since they are based on a collaborative Knowledge Model that’s unique to the organization.

Viziant’s user interface dramatically reduces the time it takes an analyst to become productive on the system, or for a domain expert to further tailor content organization, hiding all the underlying complexity of the system. Viziant quickly and automatically “reads” documents, understands their meaning, extracts important and often buried information, and displays the relevancy-ranked results in a format that’s easy for users to scan and explore. And only Viziant supports multi-lingual content such that the value of a document can be determined before having it translated.

Viziant is the only solution that is sophisticated enough to support all of an analyst’s complex Discovery needs, yet simple enough for non-experts to use.

“There is no single program we have that combines the features in Viziant. This is a great step toward easing the burden of analysts, like us, who routinely have to sift through several thousand messages a week.... This capability very easily increases productivity."
Lead Analyst, System of Systems Analysis (SoSA), USFK

It’s the mix that counts – Blending prior knowledge with real-time Discovery in a cohesive framework
We combine the best information search and analytics technologies available in unique ways to give users what they want – a fast, efficient way to find meaningful information buried in massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. We recognize there are rapid improvements in this area of the software industry, so we have built a very open architecture that can incorporate new tools to take advantage of future developments. Our solution includes four key elements:

Viziant's core engine categorizes data into tailored, pre-defined concepts, retaining key metadata and protecting privacy.

Viziant Frame of Reference suggests categories and guides the most effective search of organized content

Multiple views of search results provides for efficient analysis of complex information; users selectively view original data.

Shared workspaces, blogs and active alerts drive efficiency; Viziant provides continuous human and machine learning precision.

In today’s world, no one works alone. Viziant facilitates knowledge transfer and collaboration through shared “Workspaces” where users can save work in progress, set and receive alerts to new knowledge, and exchange ideas. What’s more, Viziant applies patented technology that combines human and machine feedback, continuously learning what’s important in the data so content organization and results get more relevant over time.

Best-of-breed Discovery, hybrid approach and patented technologies - how it works  


 

 

 

Viziant’s unique technology - how it works
The Knowledge Model is a metadata driven set of easily extensible base taxonomies and indexes delivered with the product, and stores only links to the actual data. This allows analysts to examine concepts and interconnections among data to determine their relevance before deciding whether to go to the time and effort of reading them individually, translating them or getting legal approval to view them. This also helps meet scalability, privacy and copyright concerns.

The analytics engine is where much of our unique, proprietary technology comes into play. Viziant combines multiple forms of data analysis which draw on many underlying technologies and disciplines to support intelligent Discovery. The analytics engine can analyze information in both hierarchical and associative models. A hierarchical model assumes a “parent –child” relationship in which, for the term “city” occurs lower in the hierarchy than the term “state.” A side-by-side association occurs when, for example, two terrorism suspects attended the same school or were quoted on the same website.

Viziant’s joint collaboration spaces and wiki’s make it easy for all users of the system to share notes and observations, saved searches, document references and active new data alerts with other analysts. This collaborative information sharing model is one that is being eagerly embraced by analysts who have grown up using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Another technology differentiator is our Rich Internet Application interface, one of the first UI’s in any market to use Adobe Flex 2 to provide a three-dimensional graphical view of the data. Our early customers in the defense and intelligence fields tell us Viziant’s user interface dramatically reduces the time it takes an analyst to become productive on the system, or for a domain expert to begin adding subjects and entities of interest to it. Remember, also, that the user sees the result set in context, in a way that goes beyond classic search and hierarchy-driven business intelligence. Again, the benefit is the ability to identify hidden insights and opportunities more quickly.

Frame of Reference is where the user does a lot of his work in Viziant, and leverages all other aspects of our solution. Frame of Reference is a fresh and powerful approach to Discovery because it intelligently directs a search to relevant areas while filtering out irrelevant documents that may contain the search term. You can think of the “frame of reference” as the analyst’s view of the world at that moment. Analysts can explore connections which both reinforce the status quo view of the world and offer alternative explanations, by switching the contextual viewpoint in a line of questioning.

Finally, Viziant's patented knowledge Discovery method with utility functions and feedback loops provides continuous human- and machine-assisted learning so the overall system gets "smarter" as it's used.