The Structure of Information

The cost of digital storage is decreasing over the past years and led to an explosion in the volume of unstructured content. The significant increase in volume has serious consequences by reducing productivity:

• It is more and more difficult to find essential information among the growing volume. Surveys among organizations showed that 42% of workforces, ranging from executive managers to business users, spend 20% of their business time in seeking information. That in mind, increasing the efficiency of information management and searches offers a huge potential for saving time and money.
• Scattered storage systems have grown and evolved over time causing information assets to be distributed over several, non-integrated systems. Data bases, application-specific data-backends, e-mail stores, file systems and servers, personal and global address books, intranet and wiki pages are well suited for specific need, but cause enormous overhead to maintain, synchronize, backup and administer.
• Traditional approaches to maintain unstructured content are reaching limits. In some circumstances, it is no longer possible to perform a full back up within the available daily down-time. This leads to unwanted timespans during which essentially no backups are available.

We designed a framework that supports the implementation of a semantic storage system for unstructured content. Similar to a human mind that is establishing connections between concepts and objects, AL!SE provides technology that allows one to replace traditional hierarchical file systems with more user-friendly and intuitive systems.

Solutions built on top of a semantic network of unstructured content and semantically enriched metadata, may provide the following advantages in comparison to existing approaches:

• Search and retrieval times for unstructured content can be reduced: Any types of data, including documents, multimedia assets, such as pictures or videos, and all types of data sources, including, but not restricted to common file servers, web servers, and mail servers.
• A semantic data management framework to empower applications to be built, making use of the extended functionalities in comparison to traditional file systems.
• Semantic relations can be used to improve the safety and efficiency of medium-term archiving of said content by archiving only relevant, active content.
• Semantic information allows the implementation of intelligent, proactive and adaptive content sharing strategies.

AL!SE introduces technologies that expose the unstructured content and associated metadata to users and applications in an structured way.