Bring archives alive with auto structure system

Research at Southampton University into document archiving and retrieval has come good, with huge deals from the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Homeland Security joining Lloyds of London and the FSA. Active Navigation has built what is essentially a linguistic analysis tool, which scans unstructured data for themes, key words and phrases – and then automatically creates summaries and archive structures for document management navigation. Says pre-ales engineer Chris Dewey: “Problems clients face are around taking content archives and putting them into a document management system. There’s very little metadata so retrieval is very difficult. Our system offers a search based on metadata it associates with documents.” It’s aimed at text-based documents, and for many will solve the classic re-inventing the wheel problem. “A few thousand pounds buys five days of consultancy,” says Dewey. “We analyse the content and build a provisional taxonomy which shows what it can do.” Full software starts at £50k – providing a working solution with software licence for several hundred employees.