NewsLink Issue 43/May 2003 =========================================================================== NewsLink is a free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring news and resources for the information industry. If you are receiving this issue as a forward and would like to become a subscriber, please visit our Web site at https://www.infotoday.com or send a blank e-mail to join-infotoday@lists.infotoday.com. =========================================================================== SPONSOR Inmagic =========================================================================== "Delivering Content that Makes a Difference," a FREE White Paper from Inmagic This paper, prepared by the Gilbane Report, describes the key components of an effective content management system and illustrates how companies benefit from improved decision making by providing users with access to well-organized, highly relevant and timely information. Download your white paper at http://www.inmagic.com/gilbane/380/ =========================================================================== IN THIS ISSUE =========================================================================== 1) WELCOME 2) ITI SNAP POLL 3) NEWSLINK MONTHLY SPOTLIGHT 4) NEWSBREAKS 5) FEATURED ARTICLES 6) CONFERENCE CONNECTION 7) BOOKSHELF =========================================================================== 1) WELCOME =========================================================================== Welcome to the May 2003 issue of NewsLink, Information Today, Inc.'s FREE e-mail newsletter for library and information professionals. It's a busy time at Information Today, Inc. Next week, from May 6-8, at the New York Hilton, ITI will be hosting two simultaneous events. The first, InfoToday 2003, is designed for information professionals, knowledge managers, and librarians, and includes three individual conferences: National Online, KnowledgeNets, and E-Libraries. The program is available at https://www.infotoday.com/it2003/. If you'd like to attend the conference or the exhibits you can register on site at the event. The second show is Streaming Media NY 2003. This event is perfect for anyone looking to implement streaming and digital media into their organization. Check it out at http://www.streamingmedia.com/ny/. We hope to see you in New York. We'll also, hopefully, have a chance to see many of you at SLA and ALA next month. For those of you who don't know, ALA is having a lot of discussion regarding their annual event scheduled to take place in Toronto. SARS has caused quite a stir up there, but things seem to be getting better, and we're confident that ALA will find a way to get us all together this summer. In this issue's Monthly Spotlight, Paula takes a look at Inxight Software. Inxight's products are providing a number of government agencies and other organizations with a solution to understanding and effectively using unstructured data. If you have any comments or suggestions on any special content you would like to see covered or on how to improve this newsletter and the information held in it, please reply to newslink@infotoday.com. Best Wishes, Tom Hogan, Jr. =========================================================================== 2) ITI SNAP POLL =========================================================================== With access to free Internet content, has it been difficult to justify paying for fee-based information to your organization's management? Please comment. https://www.infotoday.com/default.shtml. =========================================================================== 3) NEWSLINK MONTHLY SPOTLIGHT =========================================================================== Gaining Inxight into Unstructured Enterprise Information By Paula J. Hane The recent war in Iraq certainly highlighted the importance of military intelligence operations. Policy-makers, military planners, and numerous agencies relied on having fast and accurate ways to sift through and analyze enormous quantities of information and data to support decision making. Though the combat has ended, the ongoing security issues remain and the Bush administration has committed to increased spending for the country's intelligence infrastructure. One company that supplies information retrieval solutions to various government organizations is Inxight Software, Inc. Its government customers include the European Patent Office, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The company recently announced that it secured two major contracts because of the increasing need for software that can organize, analyze, and deliver information from unstructured text sources. Both the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), one of the world's premier scientific centers, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) have chosen Inxight SmartDiscovery for their information-analysis environments. LLNL is a national security laboratory that's managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Among LLNL's many missions is the development of tools and capabilities for gathering, manipulating, and mining vast quantities of data and information. Using SmartDiscovery, LLNL has processed and indexed close to 2 million text files both from historical archives and new incoming reports and documents. Scientists and analysts are now able to query this information to easily locate data that might help identify previously unknown linkages or associations within the data. DIA covers all aspects of military intelligence requirements. It'll use SmartDiscovery to automate the process of filtering key government information, which will enable its analysts to deliver important pieces of intelligence in support of U.S. military planning and operations. Inxight provides enterprise software solutions for understanding and effectively using unstructured data, such as diverse elements like word-processing documents and text files, Web pages, e-mail, and news feeds. The company says that because more than 85 percent of all enterprise information is unstructured (according to a report by IDC), most of an organization's data is not available for effective search, retrieval, or analysis. Inxight claims that its products solve this problem. SmartDiscovery's features include assisted taxonomy creation and management, categorization, automatic entity extraction, automatic document summarization, a related document finder, full-text search, support for more than 70 file formats, and an easy-to-use interface. It also integrates with third-party systems, such as portals and document management systems. Inxight serves four core markets: government organizations, enterprises (including pharmaceutical), information aggregators and publishers, and independent software vendors. New business gains in the federal government sector fueled the majority of Inxight's significant revenue growth in the first quarter 2003, though it also experienced growth in the publishing and enterprise markets. The company reported that its first-quarter 2003 revenues increased by 40 percent from the fourth quarter of 2002. Inxight signed seven new enterprise customers and expanded sales within 23 existing accounts. It also achieved year-over-year new-enterprise license revenue growth of 400 percent from the first quarter of 2002. The company says this demonstrates the success that it has experienced in changing its focus from a primarily software-license-based business to providing solutions for the enterprise. Of course, such growth is particularly noteworthy in this difficult economic climate. "Because we offer government agencies the ability to discover vital intelligence faster and more accurately than ever before in areas including homeland security, defense intelligence, and law enforcement, it's no surprise that we've seen a dramatic increase in the amount of government contracts awarded to Inxight," said John C. Laing, Inxight's president and CEO. "And as we add more features to our solutions, such as the ability to extract 'facts' from large amounts of textual information, we expect the significant growth in our government business to continue." During the first quarter of this year, the company also introduced Arabic-language support (clearly a good choice) for Inxight's entity-extraction solution. Inxight ThingFinder is a text-analysis application that automatically identifies, tags, and indexes named entities in documents, such as persons, places, addresses, and dates. This enables users to easily navigate huge volumes of text. Inxight says that its ability to understand the information inside of text at its most granular level, along with sensitivity to the language in which it's written, sets the product apart in the marketplace. Inxight's products currently support 25 languages, including Farsi, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. New languages are added as the market demands. Depending on requirements and usage, Inxight's products range in cost from $50,000 to several hundred thousand dollars for enterprise-class server solutions. Inxight solutions are based on more than 20 years of research at Xerox PARC. The company, which was founded in 1996 as a spinoff of PARC, holds more than 70 patents in information visualization, natural language processing, and information retrieval. Inxight's customers include Ariba, Computer Associates, Dow Jones, Factiva, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LexisNexis, Lotus, Oracle, Reuters, SAP, SAS, Thomson, Tivoli, and Xerox. The company, which is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., has offices throughout the U.S. and Europe. For more information, visit http://www.inxight.com or call 408/738-6299. Paula J. Hane is Information Today, Inc.'s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks. Her e-mail address is phane@infotoday.com. =========================================================================== 4) NEWSBREAKS =========================================================================== For a complete listing of previous NewsBreaks visit the Information Today, Inc. Web site at https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks. NewsBreaks from Monday, April 28, 2003 ------------------------ Google Buys Applied Semantics --> https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb030428-1.shtml ------------------------ Weekly News Digest ------------------------ -- Ovid Announces New Link Resolver and Outbound Linking -- Publishers' Group Announces Business Partners -- ebrary Announces Institutional Repository Pilot Program --> https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/wnd030428.shtml =========================================================================== 5) FEATURED ARTICLES =========================================================================== For full-text coverage of the following articles please use the hotlinks provided. ------------------------ INFORMATION TODAY Interview: Visualizing Online Information By Paula J. Hane Antarctica Systems CTO Tim Bray discusses his company's software, technology, and market strategy. --> https://www.infotoday.com/it/may03/hane2.shtml ------------------------ ONLINE Magazine Unlocking URLs: Extensions, Shortening Options, and Other Oddities By Greg R. Notess For those on the Net for years, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) seem pretty obvious and self-explanatory. But, get beyond the basics and there are all sorts of URL details that can be useful to the information professional. --> https://www.infotoday.com/online/may03/OnTheNet.shtml ------------------------ COMPUTERS IN LIBRARIES Uncovering the 'Spy' Network: Is Spyware Watching Your Library Computers? By Daniel Fidel Ferrer and Mary Mead You have a firewall, passwords, and antivirus software-but are these enough to keep prying eyes out of your computers? Often silent and invisible, "spyware" can sneak around these security measures and compromise your passwords, patron information, and everything else on your computers. Find out what you can do to stop it. --> https://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/may03/ferrer_mead.shtml ------------------------ SEARCHER Magazine Government Doublethink: Protection or Supression in Information By Miriam Drake Miriam Drake's first of two articles on government information access post-9/11 looks at a very difficult balancing act being faced by government agencies: how to keep the citizenry informed on matters of health, science, and technology without adversely affecting national security. --> https://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may03/drake.shtml ------------------------ MULTIMEDIA SCHOOLS Pathfinders: Helping Students Find Paths to Information By Kelly Kuntz Find out how this Oregon school district is supporting students and staff by guiding them through the gridlock of the information highway, assisting them in the development of effective search strategies, and helping them to understand that information is available in a variety of formats and from many resources, places, and even people. --> https://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/may03/kuntz.shtml =========================================================================== 6) CONFERENCE CONNECTION =========================================================================== Get the latest event information available for the library and information fields in the Conference Connection. The Conference Report/Update gives you an inside look at the most recent information industry events, while the Conference Calendar is updated monthly to provide you with important contact information for up-and-coming industry events. CONFERENCE REPORT/UPDATE ------------------------ InfoToday 2003 May 6-8, 2003 Hilton New York InfoToday 2003 is comprised of three core conferences: National Online 2003, KnowledgeNets 2003, and E-Libraries 2003, and offers dozens of stimulating sessions and workshops for information professionals, librarians, researchers, and knowledge management practitioners. STILL TIME TO REGISTER! CALL 1-800-300-5868 NOW! Conference Web site: https://www.infotoday.com/it2003/ ------------------------ Streaming Media 2003 May 6-8, 2003 Hilton New York Streaming Media NY provides a valuable opportunity to meet face to face with business leaders and decision makers who are evaluating and implementing streaming and digital media technologies to improve corporate communications, enable distance learning, and extend media distribution capabilities. Broaden your skill sets. Clarify your buying options. And, make yourself more valuable in the marketplace in the process! STILL TIME TO REGISTER! CALL 1-800-300-5868 NOW! Conference Web site: http://www.streamingmedia.com/ny/ CONFERENCE CALENDAR ------------------- MAY 2003 May 2-7: MEDICAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION San Diego, CA Contact: http://www.mlanet.org May 4-6: 19th ANNUAL SIIA CONFERENCE San Francisco, CA Contact: http://www.siia.net May 5-8: XML Europe Conference & Exposition 2003 London, UK Contact: http://www.idealliance.org May 6-8: INFOTODAY 2003 New York, NY Contact: https://www.infotoday.com May 28-30: SOCIETY FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING (SSP) 2003 ANNUAL MEETING Baltimore, MD Contact: http://www.sspnet.org For the complete Conference Calendar visit https://www.infotoday.com/calendar.shtml. =========================================================================== 7) BOOKSHELF =========================================================================== Building and Running a Successful Research Business: A Guide for the Independent Information Professional By Mary Ellen Bates | Edited by Reva Basch This is the handbook every aspiring independent information professional needs to launch, manage, and build a research business. Organized into four sections, "Getting Started," "Running the Business," "Marketing," and "Researching," the book walks you through every step of the process. Author Mary Ellen Bates covers everything from "is this right for you?" to closing the sale, managing clients, promoting your business on the Web, and tapping into powerful information sources beyond the Web. Bates, a popular author and speaker and a long-time successful independent info pro, reveals all the tips, tricks, and techniques for setting up, running, and growing your own information business. Order your copy today! https://books.infotoday.com/books/BuildingRunning.shtml -------------- CyberAge Books May 2003/472 pp/softbound ISBN 0-910965-62-5 Regular price: $29.95 Sale price: $23.95 =========================================================================== SPONSOR Inmagic =========================================================================== "Delivering Content that Makes a Difference," a FREE White Paper from Inmagic This paper, prepared by the Gilbane Report, describes the key components of an effective content management system and illustrates how companies benefit from improved decision making by providing users with access to well-organized, highly relevant and timely information. Download your white paper at http://www.inmagic.com/gilbane/380/ =========================================================================== ©2003 Information Today, Inc. all rights reserved. This newsletter is published by Information Today, Inc. Editor in Chief: Tom Hogan, Jr. Managing Editor: Stacey Sochacki Phone: 609-654-6266 Fax: 609-654-4309 Web site: https://www.infotoday.com E-mail: newslink@infotoday.com To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-infotoday-9382643Q@lists.infotoday.com.