Describes Attivio's combination of unstructured and structured data for a new kind of BI. ... entity data and the sentiment analysis and other analysis techniques become part of the meta data for the unstructured data. This allows the unstructured data to be presented as structured data. You can do relational joins between the structured and unstructured data to answer questions like: “Find all negative product reviews that mention both the iPad and our top-20 best sellers.”
"IDOL Universal Search provides users with a simple, personalized search experience tailored specifically to their unique requirements. In many typical environments, content may be spread across disparate internal data repositories and systems as well as external content sources and engines. Users are forced to conduct multiple, repetitive searches or risk missing crucial information. With Universal Search, a single query quickly federates unified results across systems in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate Web interface. Users get the big picture quickly through advanced visualization and dynamic categorization for a faster, more thorough exploration of results."
Results from a usability test - only 1% of the time did users change search strategy. So search engines need to concentrate on improving reliability of simple search results.
