Autonomy Continues the Path to eDiscovery with Conceptual Search

By Greg Crites | Published Feb 13, 2009

Autonomy Unveils Search Process Validation Module You have been charged with investigating say… your average Wall Street Super-Sized trading office. Wouldn’t it be grand if you could employ software-driven conceptual analytics to refine your search process of the target data repositories? With eDiscovery being such a priority for enterprises today, they need a solution that helps them find the information need fast and they need to prove they did it the right way. Autonomy has come to the rescue with a new search module that claims to do all this and more.

Autonomy gets the connection between Search and eDiscovery. And they seem to know very well the market they need to sell these solutions to. That's why they bought Interwoven, for it's huge base of legal clients.

Now that they have those clients in hand, they offer up a new solution to help them with the discovery process. The Search Process Validation Module (SPV). The new SPV module is powered by Autonomy's core infrastructure software product, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL). This module offers a fully audited search methodology to ensure a forensically sound search strategy.

In addition to standard search methods such as keyword, Boolean, metadata, parametric and others, IDOL offers conceptual search. Conceptual search is the ability to return results which are conceptually related to a search term or phrase. That is, it is the process of being able to understand the idea behind a phrase and find matching information.

The SPV module suggests the best search approach to use and clearly delineates the query pipeline, including concepts found, term frequencies and repositories searched for each search method used. SPV provides a detailed audit trail, highlighting both conceptual clusters and keywords in the result set as well as any user profiling, entity extraction or metadata elements.

In addition, the business logic and parameters used in the relevancy calculation are transparent and audited to ensure a defensible search process.

Some feature highlights of the Search Process Validation Module:

Dynamic Search Tracer - a running audit trail of the user's search history, with snapshot ability for any of the relevant steps and results.
Advanced Term List Analytics - Intuitive statistical and visual tools for determining the impact of search modifications. Configurable views provide dynamic representations of:

Term frequencies
Stem variants
Wildcard expansions.
Term hit counts
Family
Data types
Languages
Custodians, and more.

Search Audit - Includes repositories searched, search terms used and omitted, query expansions, concepts involved, and the analytics used to arrive at the final result set.
Search Journey - SPV clearly delineates the logical path that the search engine took to arrive at a given set of results.
Real-time Validation Sampling - SPV's real-time, audited validation sampling can be launched at any stage in the search process.
Defensibility Reporting - Data statistics, validation, and term list refinement reports.

With access to over 400 repositories and over 1000 file formats, including audio and video files, Autonomy aims to provide a fully FRCP-compliant search for a complete inventory of the required enterprise corpus with no "jump-outs" or partial indexing. Faced with a large eDiscovery project, Autonomy claims possession of the tools to tackle the task.

Another Move into the Discovery Market

The SPV is another move by Autonomy to further move into the information discovery market. As the Interwoven solutions such as Worksite get integrated into the Autonomy product line, we are likely to see even more solutions for the legal industry.

Find out more about Autonomy and their discovery solutions on their website.