Product Overview

The description of the Pinpoint SMS product family starts with the search engine core that is common to all SMS models and vertical editions. Shown below in Figure 1 is the search engine core displayed with its components that implement just a keyword search engine. The database engine and concept search engine core overviews are not shown.

The SMS 100 uses the keyword and database search engine cores, and the SMS 200 core uses the keyword, database, and concept searching cores. A user or VAR/ISV selects the SMS core option based on the search needs of a vertical applicaton. Pinpoint will offer an array of connectors that can be used to provide access to a wide variety of structured content data silos, Internet, unstructured content and application content and services locally. This selection process of search core, connectors and applications creates various Pinpoint vertical editions.

The Search Engine Core

The SMS 100 and SMS 200 product cores have a search engine core that connects to an Intranet, local hard disk drive and Internet. Figure 1. illustrates the major software blocks and their relationship for our search engine product core. Additional connectors and applications will be available, and details can be found on other web pages found at our website.

Figure 1. Search Core Basic Software Modules.

Pinpoint base product is a search management system software package mounted inside an appliance along with a search engine core, web crawler and support for federated search.  Software included in the search engine core performs the following tasks:

• LAN configuration management The LAN configuration management module enables the user to find and input the appropriate appliance address or enable the default address (the network may be using DHCP network address generation).. The appliance can now "see" all of the other LAN computers. In addition, file type selection, and LAN file location are initially configured through this module.
• Download and update software management The update/download management module enables manual or automatic download of new, Pinpoint software versions along with any appropriate service packs for improved system performance.
• Diagnostics management The diagnostics management module enables remote and local access to internal error logs and the content of the indexed database. This access enables troubleshooting operations.
• Network and access security management Network and access security management module enables the user/admin to configure group and user privileges when searching the indexed database. Shared/not shared directory access and LAN computer user name/password are honored. A SSL encryption addition enables secure communications with external content resources on the Internet.
• Web spider with file MIME content filter/extraction The web spider goes out on the Internet and brings back content from specified domains and/or sub-domains. The spider is designed to defeat DOS (denial of service) placed defenses by carefully managing number of files, time of day, and frequency of website access. The filter/extraction module removes metadata attached to files, extracts content from inside the file structure, and sends the text file to the index engine. In some cases the stripped metadata is also sent to the indexing engine.
• Indexing engine The indexing engine, ana advanced keyword engine, eliminates "stop" words (the, an, etc.), normalizes the word with the help of the corpus, and places the shortened and normalized word into a local, private database. Document location, page number, page location, etc. are also stored enabling search and retrieval operations.
• Search engine The search engine takes the entered search phrase and tries to find a match in the indexed database.
• Relevance engine The relevance engine returns a normalized number indicating how relevant a document is compared to other pages, and indicates how successfully the match is compared to the search phrase. The relevance algorithm varies based on search engine types and desired search results.
• Local, private database interface for indexed content output. The local index database stores only shortened words with the stop words eliminated. External database pre-indexed content is also stored in this private database.
• Local corpus interface (lexicon, Thesaurus, abbreviation handler, proper nouns, etc.) The local corpus supports the conversion of the word to be indexed into a shortened form, replaces abbreviations with the actual expanded word, and identifies proper nouns. Proper nouns are un-shortened.
• Web interface including an administrative interface, search query screen, and results screen The web interface enables our software to talk to off-the-shelf browsers found on each computer on the LAN.
• SOAP interface for federation support The SOAP interface (an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over a computer network) supports federation - the ability to use multiple appliances in parallel to index and search larger data silos and content locations.

Not shown is a database search engine core that connects directly to external data silos and a concept search engine. The database search engine stores pre-indexed database content into the shared, private database reserved for indexed results as shown in the figure above. The concept search engine indexed results also share the common, internal database. A family of external database data silo connectors are required to connect the data silo to the internal database index engine. Again, various data connectors are available today.