Attivio

Boston based Attivio (www.attivio.com) is founded by ex-FAST key people with Ali Riaz in the driver’s seat, and promises to bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Search and traditional Databases/Information Warehouses.

Being less than two years old, the new company is already making headlines, and time (and customers) will reveal how much is pure product strenght and how much is the usual marketing blabla.

Many with DB background miss the ability to do real JOINs with traditional enterprise search engines, where typically DB tables need to be de-normalized and flattened before being indexed. For most use-cases that doesn’t cause a big problem, but for some applications the amount of redundancy in the engine just grows too big, and/or the flexibility of doing varied queries along other axis than the index was designed for, gets complicated or impossible.

The problem has been that a runtime JOIN is very costly – where RDBMS’s can spend minutes or hours computing a huge JOIN query, you expect from an Enterprise Search Engine that the result be ready in milliseconds. So if Oracle have not succeeded in combining unstructured search with large structured queries in an efficient way, how can a small startup do it? Or can they?

We’ll follow-up once the product, called Active Intelligence Engine^TM (AIE) has been prooven a bit more in the market.

And IF Attivio’s claims are correct, then both Oracle and Microsoft/FAST really have something to fear, because this is something the information retrieval world have been waiting for a loong time!

Cominvent this week announced that we have started a new OpenID provider service for Norwegian users who want a Norwegian, short, easy to remember, life-long OpenID ID. Namely minOpenID.no.

The site offers to register an id under one of the two domains myid.no or minopenid.no, for free. MinOpenID.no also aims to be a place for general information about OpenID, such as useful articles, HOWTOs and news.

As a backend provider we have chosen JanRain, the people behind the worlds most popular OpenID provider, myopenid.com. We’re a co-branded affiliate. This means that the feature set and security is state-of-the-art.

We intend to give full freedom to our users. We will write articles about how to setup delegation for their own domain, and although we do not provide delegation of the myid.no ID to another provider (myopenid.com does not allow), we might setup that as well one day.

Visit the site and see for yourself. We’re open for feedback.

Today, March 26th is Document Freedom Day (DFD). The whole computer industry (perhaps except from Microsoft and friends) focus on interoperability and open document formats this day.

This of course links nicely into the debate about whether ISO should adopt Microsoft’s fresh OOXML format which basically is an XML-ification of legacy MS-Office binary document formats, as international standards based on the ECMA draft document, or whether the industry is better suited cooperating on today’s ISO standard for office documents, the Open Document Format (ODF).

The discussion some times looks like a war, and Microsoft has spent a lot of energy (and money, some claim) the last months in persuading the national ISO bodies to vote for their format, so that they can claim to be standards compliant rather than being forced to implement ODF, which MS view as a serious threat to their solid MS-Office monopoly. This has been carefully created over the last decade, locking users into buying and upgrading their MS-Office software to be able to read the latest and greates .doc, .xml and .ppt files being sent from business partners and friends. Being forced to support ODF in MS-Office will mean the beginning of real competition on the Office-suite market since the major barrier for interoperability, the document format, is removed.

To learn more about free document formats and the Document Freedom Day, visit http://www.documentfreedom.org/

Open Source Software (OSS) and free software has been an alternative to commercial, licensed software for decades. Most known and successful are perhaps projects like GNU/Linux (licensed under the GNU General Public License, GPL), OpenOffice.org, Apache web server and MySQL. They have all managed to produce excellent, high-quality, stable software with an impressive wide-spread use. Other well known projects that are also Open Source are Java programming language, Norwegian TrollTech’s (now Nokia) Qt, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, eZ Publish, and the list goes on.

For Search, there are a few players picking up speed that you should be aware of:

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