Siderean: Navigation is new enterprise search

Siderean Software Inc. has made its name by providing a navigational front end to previously disparate islands of structured and semi-structured data. Now it's ready to challenge enterprise search vendors with what it says is a superior model for finding information.

Its Seamark Navigator acts as metadata aggregator on the back end, stores the information in a database, and organizes structured views of the data to help users navigate to the files they need. Siderean’s recently appointed CEO, Robert Petrossian, dropped by Computerworld yesterday to talk about the product and the company’s future direction.

Most of Siderean’s clients - federal government, financial services and life sciences - all have invested heavily in creating taxonomies and applying metadata to files. Seamark adds user friendly front end to create what Petrossian calls a “visual interface” to the metadata. “Our product allows them to leverage that out to end users without a huge amount of effort,” Petrossian says.  For research, for example, users can quickly see how many papers in the same category have been published, how many other papers were published in the same year, how many other papers were published by the same author, and so on. These relationships are are generated by the back-end data base on the fly, as users need them, Petrossian says.

The system, built using XML and a Web services front end, also uses the W3C standard Resource Description Framework under the hood to organize metadata. The product can even turn queries into RSS feeds, providing a continuous string of, for example, papers in a given subject area as they are published to the system.

I could have used this feature recently. I was fact checking on a tight deadline and searching for a professor’s name in a university’s online directory. I had the wrong spelling of his last name, so he simply didn’t show up in my search. A tool like this would have allowed me to surf through all names in his department or through a list of all people with the same title in that organization.

Now Siderian is jumping into the unstructured data game with a “hybrid model” that allows users to scoop up and add metadata to selected files. It’s working on a new version of its product, which it says will be released this fall. Siderean believes that the navigational model will win out over enterprise search methodologies available today. I suspect it’s more likely, however, that both models ultimately will survive side by side – or be integrated into a single offering.