Customer Examples - Enterprise Search

A major mining corporation approached InfoFUSION for assistance in gaining access to the enormous amount of information they possessed in both hardcopy and softcopy form. As this organization acquires other companies the wealth of information about the real world (reports, studies, samples, etc.) grows as well. As part of their operation, they have compiled a very large library of this information. This library is distributed around the globe. Upper management realized that they had information that they knew nothing about and were most likely spending money repeating the collection of information that they probably had. Additionally, they were unaware of much of the information they had because there was no consolidated efficient way to access this information. Finally, the majority of their information has a geospatial component and being able to analyze this data using this component would increase the value of their data.

The InfoFUSION team worked with the customer's engineers to define a geographically distributed system to provide access to all of this information. The solution consisted of databases, document repositories, SharePoint instances, web servers and applications, etc. at each geographic location. This collection of technologies were integrated so that each geographic location managed and maintained their own document libraries. These libraries were periodically scanned for new information. All information was cataloged two ways. First, the information was indexed to allow for full-text searching. Second, the information was geospatially indexed to support the geolocational definition of each and every document. Web enabled applications were custom built to support the full-text querying capability of each of the geographically distributed libraries. The user would type in a textual query (similar to the Google interface) and the system would perform the full-text lookups at each of the locations. Results were then compiled based on the location where the result was located as well as search relevance (how close the result matched the search text). Another web enabled application was constructed that supported the same type of search capability for text only using geographic location and proximity as the search criteria. A Microsoft Bing map was displayed to the user and the user was asked to indicate an area of interest on the map that they were interested in knowing if the library held any information about. Each library location was queried for documents that contained information pertaining to the indicated area of interest. Results were then compiled based on the library location and the geographic relevance (geographically how close the result matched the area of interest).

This customer recognized InfoFUSION's capabilities to develop state of the art software systems and employed them to solve a significant problem in a critically important system.