Technology Overview
Advanced Technology Applied to the Legal Litigation Workflow
Inference’s underlying engine uses Autonomy’s proven and widely accepted IDOL™ platform. Based on two years of research and development in partnership with Autonomy and key law firms, Inference uniquely applies “meaning-based computing” within the boundaries of accepted legal review methodologies. Founded in 1996, Autonomy is an industry leader in enterprise software and is recognized by analysts, including the Gartner Group, Forrester Research and Delphi. With offices worldwide, Autonomy (London Stock Exchange: AU) has a market cap of $2.2 billion and its trusted technology is deployed in more than 16,000 blue-chip corporations and government agencies, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange, that rely on IDOL’s powerful, pattern-matching algorithms to extract meaning from unstructured information.
Autonomy IDOL™
Autonomy’s IDOL™ engine is the core of Inference Data’s solution, Inference. Resting above the system’s data, the IDOL™ server functions as the platform for conceptual and contextual understanding of information within the system. Born out of research founded at Cambridge University, IDOL’s Meaning Based Computing utilizes a unique combination of Shannon’s Information Theory and Bayesian Inference. These algorithmic calculations extract patterns and identify similar trends, forming conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data, whether structured, semi-structured or unstructured, including email, audio and video. The engine analyzes a system’s information and data, linking similar and like documents across the dataset, regardless of the type or format of the data, in real time.
Key features of the IDOL™ engine include categorization, tagging, linking, retrieval and profiling, enabling faster and more effective responses to data and communications within the system.
Scalable Architecture
A key differentiator of Inference is its ability to scale. By having the data in a distributed index environment, we do not experience the size or speed limitations of other analytics and review providers. As other products utilize standard databases (e.g., SQL), each experiences limitations based on a linear architecture. As the size of databases increases, performance is inversely affected. Inference is built on an architecture that allows the system to rapidly scale beyond the requirements of even the largest litigation cases by incorporating the Distributed Action Handler (DAH). The DAH translates queries and index instructions from Inference to the Autonomy IDOL™ index engine. As data increases, additional engines can be introduced to continually scale while ensuring peak performance. |
