Eidetica - A new CWI Spin-off Company
by Henk Nieland
Eidetica is the most recent of CWI’s spin-off companies (seven
were established in the last five years). It was created by researchers
in the Interactive Information Engineering theme, combining expertise
in linguistics and mathematical clustering of dependency networks
for textual domains. Eidetica provides software solutions for
information managers, responsible for, eg, an intranet, a trend
watching service, or a library, enabling them to easily set up
high quality browsing, searching and analytic services, thus increasing
both their productivity and variety of competence.
Eidetica is a Twinning venture - a concept introduced by the ministry
of Economic Affairs to support emerging ICT companies with excellent
office facilities, business coaching and financial support in
the form of seed or venture capital. Both CWI and Twinning have
a share in Eidetica. The company maintains intensive contacts
with the CWI research group, which focuses on automatic creation
of user friendly access and control environments for large data
and information collections based on content analysis.
The unique quality of Eidetica’s software architecture is the
ability to extract quality controlled subject maps from large
collections of documents. (The term ‘eidetica’ refers to the ability
to recollect an earlier observation as a realistic image in one?s
mind.) Using these expert supervised subject maps as a basis,
Eidetica?s workbenches automatically generate intranet browsers
and document delivery systems that reliably and efficiently guide
their users through large data collections so as to obtain all
- and only - the latest relevant information.
Eidetica’s products range from a full text subject indexer through
the metadata agent architecture to the knowledge manager’s workbench,
each containing the document support browser technology.
In order to do more with electronic information collections than
search for a few words and wrestle one’s way through endless lists
of not very relevant results, Eidetica’s software enables browsing
through document collections at a conceptual level. This is achieved
through the following steps:
- merge the complete, miscellaneous document collection into a uniform
format;
- read all documents to extract a dictionary of subjects
- create various ‘maps’ of the collection: which documents address
which subjects, what authors write about what subjects, which
subjects are connected to other subjects
- quality control: visualize the constructed maps and give the information
manager tools to refine them
- use the subject maps to build browsing and querying interfaces
that guide the user through the collection to find precisely the
right information.
Eidetica’s software helps improve efficiency and comfort in performing
the information and knowledge manager’s responsibilities, such
as: collecting publications responding to a specific question,
matching company expertise with such questions and with outside
contacts, routing the continuous intake of documents and information,
deciding on who should read what, and archiving and arranging
collections and providing access mechanisms for clients. It also
offers expanding possibilities in the analysis of large document
collections, such as personnel activity matching in a large organization,
and trend watching in strategic literature.
At the core of Eidetica’s system is a proprietary clustering method
that can efficiently find groups of related information in collections
about 1000 times larger than conventional methods, and advanced
methods to extract subject keywords inside documents and titles.
In a nutshell, Eidetica’s benefits are:
- simple and intuitive interfaces
- structured screen information
- better support of existing functionality
- more efficient performance of traditional tasks
- analysis methods
- open architecture.
For more information, see: http://www.eidetica.com
Please contact:
Annius V. Groenink - CEO Eidetica
Tel :+31 20 888 4126
E-mail: avg@eidetica.com
