Knowledge Discovery and Sharing Labs

The ability to distill timely, relevant, and meaningful knowledge from today’s world of extremely large data, text, and multimedia files is a critical function of any organization. Equally critical is the ability to make informed real-time strategic decisions from continuous data streams. In today’s information society, we are clearly overwhelmed with data. The ability to filter large streams of data into useful information is the difference between success and failure. Noblis’ Knowledge Management (KM) discipline addresses the reduction, filtering, and distillation of data into useful information and knowledge through the implementation of strong strategies, processes, and technologies while addressing organizational culture.

Purpose

The purpose of the KM Lab is to identify, examine, evaluate, and develop KM solutions and processes to meet the requirements of Noblis clients. Specifically, the KM Lab provides the following services:
  • Objective examination and evaluation of third party KM solutions on behalf of Noblis clients. Rarely is a single commercial KM tool a “magic hammer” solution that meets the needs of every organization. Noblis traditionally enters into extended evaluation agreements with leading vendors in the KM space to build a strong technological foundation in the lab that is available for proof-of-concept design and development by Noblis clients. Through evaluation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, the experience of the KM team members, and use of the KM Lab, Noblis is able to provide sound recommendations and solutions as a trusted third party.
  • Maintenance of a KM Tool Catalog that contains thorough and extensive descriptions, technical summaries, ratings, customer base, and other criteria. This catalog can be referenced by Noblis clients interested in receiving an unbiased expert opinion of tools in the KM space. The catalog may also be used as “Toolkit Selector” from which to choose those products and services that most closely map to requirements.
  • Custom development of KM solutions through the integration of COTS KM software and Noblis-developed processes. The KM Lab gives Noblis the ability to identify the strengths/weaknesses and create synergy among these products to provide the client with the best possible comprehensive KM solution that meets their requirements.

Capabilities

The KM Lab has the following capabilities:

  • Evaluation
    • The KM Lab has the capacity to perform multiple simultaneous evaluations of KM software and services within and across projects.
  • Development
    • The KM Lab is equipped with an application development and hosting environment containing powerful servers, each dedicated to specific KM software and/or processes such as entity/fact extraction, relationship and link analysis, automated categorization, and visualization tools. In doing so, the KM Lab is able to provide efficient support across multiple projects.
  • Demonstration
    • The KM Lab is able to accommodate impromptu requests for demonstrations of all KM COTS software currently in the lab and custom Noblis KM solutions. Noblis staff members are encouraged to attend/request demonstrations as these solutions may be applicable to other clients.
  • Secure Facility
    • The KM Lab is a secure, controlled-access facility capable of supporting projects with stringent data security requirements.
  • Size and Scalability
    • The KM Lab is capable of rapidly preparing customized proof-of-concept applications and demonstrations based upon existing application frameworks, lessons learned and best practices, and an incremental development methodology. The KM Lab does not encounter limitations or constraints in terms of data and application size and scalability.

Recent Research Conducted

  • Profile/fingerprint incoming National Institutes of Health (NIH) research proposals and reviewers to recommend best possible matches
  • Identification of patterns and trends among submitted research to avoid duplication and identify emerging areas or deficiencies of research
  • Creation of a KM-based Investigation Support System, a multi-year Research and Development (R&D) project, that provides law enforcement agencies with an advanced proactive system to extract, process, and analyze text-based case materials regardless of source or structure to derive facts, relationships, similarities, patterns, and trends
  • Application of multiple data visualization techniques to relational database data and text mining outputs
  • Integration of data visualization tools to produce “situational awareness” center
  • Taxonomy generation from “scratch” or seed taxonomy
  • Relationship identification and discovery of concepts occurring within and across documents
  • Text mine/crawl large sources of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) data to return only concept-specific documents (document filtering)
  • Automated summarization of large documents
  • Visually represent “knowledge trails” created by users and analysts as they traverse a large corpus of data (structured/unstructured) to improve the capture of lessons learned and document the knowledge discovery process for future possible reuse
  • Harvest data from multiple sources to promote information sharing within and across business units and/or organizations
  • Search and analysis of multimedia files (audio/video) using COTS products

Demonstration Capabilities

The KM Lab is able to demonstrate:

  • Content structuring and automated categorization
  • Advanced search and information retrieval
  • Expertise location
  • Entity and fact extraction
  • Online collaboration
  • Relationship and link analysis
  • Automated concept extraction
  • Advanced data visualization
  • Entity profiling by concepts (documents, people, organizations)
  • Taxonomy generation and management
  • Text mining
  • Concept filtering
  • Gap analysis
  • Multimedia search and analysis

Current List of Equipment

The KM Lab’s inventory of software and hardware is constantly expanding to evaluate new KM technologies and meet project needs.

At the current time, our software inventory includes:

  • Entrieva SemioTagger 4/5/6
  • Entrieva Discovery
  • Entrieva SemioMap
  • Entrieva SemioSkyline
  • Collexis 3.6/4.0
  • Convera RetrievalWare 7.0/8.03
  • Convera Taxonomy & Classification Workbench
  • Convera ScreeningRoom 3.0
  • Inxight Smart Discovery 3.1/4.0
  • Inxight VizServer Publisher (StarTree/TableLens/Time-Wall)
  • Inxight FactFinder Pre-release
  • Kofax Mohomine
  • Stratify Discovery System 3.0
  • Stratify Analytics
  • Visual Analytics VisuaLinks 3.0
  • Visual Analytics Digital Information Gateway (DIG) 2.0
  • Data Descriptions Data Desk 6.0
  • SQL Server 2000
  • Windows Server 2000/2003

At the current time, our hardware inventory includes:

  • Snap!Server Network Attached Storage (240 GB)
  • Snap!Server Network Attached Storage (480 GB)
  • (2) LaCie 500 GB USB 2.0/FireWire external storage devices
  • (4) Dell Optiplex GX260: 2.0GHz Intel Pentium, 60 GB HD, 1.0 GB RAM
  • (10) Dell Optiplex GX270: 2.4 GHz Intel Pentium, 100 GB HD, 1 GB RAM
  • (2) Dell PowerEdge 1600SC Servers