Actionable Asset
An actionable asset refers to the mission critical data and knowledge that
drives the decision-making process and guides business transactions. Data that is unstructured, inconsistent and
incomplete is of little value in supporting decision making. Unfortunately,
only about 20% of business content is in a structured and useable format.
Gleaning consistent, complete, actionable data from jargon-rich technical
information is often a difficult, costly and labor intensive process. XSB's automated data management solutions
transform unstructured data into actionable data which is rich, structured,
precise and timely.
ACTRAD
ACTRAD is an acronym for XSB’s Acquire,
Classify, Transform, Reason, Advise, Decide methodology. Based on this
process, our tools enable business users to extract, integrate, and process
vast amounts of unstructured “dirty” data in a real time environment.
Agent
See Automated Agent
Automated Agent
An automated agent is a computer program that achieves a set of defined goals,
or performs a defined action, independent from user control or human
intervention. Some agents may have "intelligence" in the sense that they
prioritize their goals and reason about how to achieve them efficiently in a
changing environment. Certain agents may even collaborate or negotiate with one
another to accomplish their goals.
Specifically, XSB, Inc.'s
XRover® automated agents are web agents which retrieve data available on the
World Wide Web. As this data is often poorly structured and organized, a great
deal of manual labor would be needed to locate and extract relevant
information. Web agents assists users in the process of performing precise
searches to locate specific data of interest from the vast amounts of Web
available data. Once located, the agent is able to extract this information and
output results to a Microsoft Access or .XML file.
Attribute-Value
Pairs
An Attribute-value pair refers to the name of a property for an object along
with the value associated with that property. For instance (Price/$1.00) might
be an attribute-value pair of a given part.
CDF
The
Coherent Description Framework (CDF) is XSB’s proprietary ontology management system. Using CDF,
large ontologies can be constructed indicating information about classes and
their relations (objects and their attributes). CDF includes a visual editor
for concurrent editing of an ontology, and a module-like component system,
which makes it easy to combine ontologies from different sources into larger
application-specific ontologies.
Coherent Data
Coherent data is information that
is rich, precise, and timely. It is the
backbone of decision making; it is highly structured, readily queriable, and
integrated across the entire enterprise.
Coherent View®
The Coherent View® refers to a structured and amalgamated view of data
assembled from multiple semi-structured web, document, and legacy data sources.
It presents objects from these sources along with their identifying attributes.
It also preserves traceability of the presented information back to the
original data source.
Data
Classifier/Data Classification
See Ontology Directed Classifier
Data Mining
Data mining (or data acquisition) is the process of autonomously retrieving useful
information or knowledge (“actionable assets”) from large data stores or sets.
Data mining can be performed on a variety of data stores, including the World
Wide Web, relational databases, transactional databases, internal legacy
systems, pdf documents, and data warehouses. Many of XSB, Inc.’s solutions involve
automated data mining or information retrieval.
Deep Web
The term Deep Web refers to information served up on Web sites that is hidden
or generally inaccessible through traditional search methods. For example,
information that resides or is provided through searchable databases, the
results of which can only be discovered through queries or by filling out Web
based forms is considered Deep Web data. XSB's XRover® Web agents are software
robots that can locate and extract deep web data which is not accessible via
traditional keyword-based search engines.
InterProlog
Interprolog provides a mechanism for the
XSB programming language and the
Java programming language to communicate. InterProlog translates XSB terms
to Java objects and Java objects to XSB terms, so that Java can call XSB
and XSB can call Java. Communication can be established
either through the Java Native Interface, or through the use of Sockets.
InterProlog was originally developed by XSB’s partner, Declarativa Inc. and
is open-source in nature. InterProlog can be freely obtained through Declarativa's
Web site located at www.declarativa.com.
XSB, Inc. has funded its further development for the open-source community.
Master Data File
A Master Data File
contains clean, structured, consistent data that can be instantly accessed
and queried by any business unit within the organization.
NAICS
NAICS stands for the North American Industry Classification System. The NAICS taxonomy, which recently replaced
the SIC taxonomy, is the most extensively used classification system for
businesses. XSB's Ontology Directed Classifier uses this taxonomy, among others,
to classify part and service data.
XSB uses this taxonomy, among others, to classify part and service
data.
Ontology
An ontology is a defined knowledge representation format.
That is, an ontology is a shared understanding of the structure of a domain of
interest. Ontologies make it easy both for human beings (not necessarily
computer programmers) to compile and maintain a body of knowledge, and for
computer programs to use this knowledge to intelligently manipulate data.
An ontology organizes all
data using the concepts of class, object, and relationship. Classes are
organized into a hierarchy, ordered by subclass, called a taxonomy. A
well-known taxonomy is the biological taxonomy of all living things, in which
living things are subclassed into their kingdom: plant or animal. Plants and
animals are further classified into phylum, etc. An ontology extends a taxonomy
by including relationships among objects and classes, which can represent
properties and values. To continue the biological example, there is a
relationship "number of limbs" between certain classes of animals and
integers.
Many taxonomies have been
developed to organize knowledge in particular areas. For example, the UNSPSC taxonomy
attempts to structure all parts and services, the NAICS taxonomy organizes company
capabilities, and the SNOMED taxonomy describes the medical domain. XSB's
Ontology Directed Classifier
uses these taxonomies, among others, to classify part and service data.
Ontology Directed
Classifier (ODC)
Classifying data to a taxonomy can help categorize data into a form that
improves search and analyses. Classifying data to an internationally supported
taxonomy ensures that data is transferable across multiple supply chains.
Automating the process of data classification
to a target taxonomy can greatly improve data quality across the enterprise
and reduce the considerable time and expense associated with implementing
and maintaining a common coding schema.
XSB's automated Ontology
Directed Classifier (ODC) tool, is designed to
classify data based on any public or proprietary taxonomy. Additionally, ODC
enables users to easily map from one taxonomy to another. Pre-trained
classifiers can be licensed with specific knowledge for both the UNSPSC and
NAICS taxonomies.
Ontology Directed
Extraction (ODE)
Much enterprise data is presented in free text or some other poorly structured
format. In order to make this data readily usable, it must be standardized, and
inference rules applied to resolve inconsistencies in the text and infer
missing data. Using a powerful reasoning engine that mirrors human cognition,
XSB's ODE software application extracts attribute-value pairs from textual
descriptions of objects so that they can be classified and structured to a
pre-defined or customized ontology.
Ontology Mapping
The process of ontology mapping
concerns how classes from one ontology can be
mapped to classes of another taxonomy in an automated way.
Product
Equivalence
Many similarities exist between physical goods and services. Businesses users
are often required to determine when two different products or goods are
comparable - is a given HP toner cartridge the same as a given Canon toner
cartridge? Are the two products interchangeable? Product Equivalence refers to
the process by which a user determines whether or not two items are equivalent
or are so similar that they can be used interchangeably. XSB's approach to
determining Product Equivalence is as follows: two products are deemed
equivalent if they have the same core attributes or properties. To determine
this, the products are classified using the
Ontology Directed Classifier, and
information about the products is extracted from text and/or inferred by the
Ontology Directed Extractor.
These items can then be judged as equivalent or
not based on a comparison of their key attributes.
Regular Expression
(RE)
A template or pattern for a text string. A regular expression indicates, in
general terms, what characteristics the text must have to fit its template. XSB's
automated XRover® agents use
regular expressions to characterize the type of
data they wish to extract. Data fitting the pattern of a particular regular
expression is matched and then extracted.
Society of Agents
A Society of Agents is a group of inter-related
automated agents that work
together and communicate with one another to accomplish a set of pre-defined
goals.
Standardization/Data
Standardization
Standardization is an important part of many data management processes. The
need for Data Standardization
arises because certain objects may have many different textual strings or names
associated with them. For instance, the company International Business Machines
may often be designated as IBM, or IBM, Inc, or Intl Bus. Mach, and so on.
Erroneous or inconsistently represented data can lead to costly mistakes; therefore
businesses must standardize all of these various representations into an single
unified canonical structure. XSB, Inc. has a core competency in the
standardization of company names and addresses.
Taxonomy
A taxonomy is a hierarchical organization for sets of objects. Taxonomies are
used to group similar kinds of things together, placing more general
definitions at the top of the hierarchy and more specific ones at lower nodes
in the taxonomy. Two of the most well known and widely accepted global
taxonomies are the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code® (UNSPSC)
(http://www.unspsc.org/)
and the North American Industrial Classification
System (NAICS) (http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/naics.html) taxonomy. XSB's
automated data classification solutions
categorize data into a form that
improves search and analyses. Classifying data to an internationally supported
taxonomy ensures that data is transferable across multiple supply chains.
UNSPSC
The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC®) is a taxonomy of goods
and services devised by the United Nations in order to facilitate electronic
commerce. XSB's Ontology Directed Classifier
tool uses this this taxonomy to extract information about products and classify them.
WEAVE®
WEAVE® is an
automated Web based supply chain optimization tool that aggregates
multiple on-line Web catalogs with the company’s own stock room inventory to
produce an integrated virtual view of the supply chain.
WEAVE® provides a Web
based interactive search tool enabling users to locate and compare items across
the data landscape so that similar items can be quickly identified and pricing
from various suppliers can be easily referenced.
XJ
The XJ open source system allows the XSB system to serve as a presentation
logic layer for graphical user interfaces. In an XJ program, certain XSB terms
can be interpreted as models of Java Swing objects. XJ is built on top of
InterProlog, which performs the actual mapping of the XSB terms to the Java
objects. Graphical user events are captured by Java and depending on the XJ program,
either handled directly in Java or passed to XSB to be handled. XJ has been
developed in collaboration with our partner Declarativa Inc.
XRover® Agent
Technology
XRover® is XSB's automated
intelligent agent software which is designed to mine
Web data that is not readily accessible through traditional search
technologies. XRover® Web agents go
to user specified Web sites, follow links,
fill out forms, and precisely retrieve product information of interest to the
user. In contrast to general-purpose Web crawlers, XRover® agents can retrieve
information from dynamically generated pages. They are also able to bring back
not just the contents of a Web page, but selectively retrieve product
information contained at specific areas of Web pages.
XRover® Agent
Manager
The XRover® Agent Manager is XSB, Inc.'s desktop software application
that provides users with the infrastructure needed to view and manage the execution of agent tasks.
XRover® Agent
Validator
The XRover® Agent Validator
is a tool that examines a completed agent sitemap in
order to identify any errors or problems that may interfere with the proper
functioning of the agent.
XSB Logic Programming
System/XSB Prolog
XSB Prolog
is a logic programming and deductive database system that was originally
developed at the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University. The XSB
system is a highly optimized, re-engineered extension of the Prolog programming
language, blending intelligent database technology and advanced logic
programming. Most of the XSB system itself is open-source, and available at xsb.sourceforge.net. XSB, Inc. has
developed many applications and extensions of XSB some of which are
proprietary, and some of which have been donated to the open-source community.
Xtractica®
XSB's Xtractica® Product Content and Data Management
solution provides a unique
automated alternative to transform an enterprise’s content into information
that is clean, rich, timely, consistent and structured. The Xtractica® PCDM software system is the result
of over $15 Million in software research and development. Xtractica® makes data
from different sources coherent by resolving data inconsistencies and
normalizing the data according to a uniform schema (ontology) or standard. The
tool combines advanced automated tools for data acquisition, classification and
cleaning.