TextOre’s licensing of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s
Piranha is enabling the Virginia-based company to introduce a powerful search
and mining tool capable of processing large amounts of text data from the
Internet.
Piranha, an award-winning knowledge discovery engine
that won an R&D 100 Award in 2007, is an intelligent agent-based technology
that will allow TextOre to analyze text data with unprecedented speed and
accuracy. The software sorts huge numbers of text documents into groups that
are easily processed.
CEO Robert Stewart envisions the acquisition of Piranha
helping TextOre to add jobs in software development, sales, and marketing for
the new suite of products to be developed. With these new products, the company
expects to compete on a global scale.
“All of the tools being developed between TextOre
and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are multilingual and capable of searching,
clustering and mining data in any language from large repositories of data around
the world,” Stewart said.
The technology, developed by a team led by Tom Potok of
ORNL’s Computational Sciences & Engineering Division, has already been
vetted in the scientific community and been used in real-world applications by
governmental agencies.
“The system can find similar documents to a
document of interest, remove duplicated documents such as identical news
stories from different sources, and automatically classify documents by
topic,” Potok said.
Because of the scalability of the agent architecture and
better algorithms, Piranha runs 100 times faster than other search engines and
can work with continuously changing data sets. Piranha has been used by the U.S. military
and Department of Homeland Security to analyze large sets of streaming data.
TextOre and ORNL are also working to commercialize key
ORNL technologies in the forensic computing areas, according to Stewart.
“The relationship with Oak Ridge National
Laboratory will allow TextOre to rapidly accelerate our product development and
bring these highly advanced technologies to the global market faster,”
Stewart said.
TextOre plans to expand its offices in Fairfax, Va.,
to support the anticipated growth from the licensing of Piranha.
Piranha also received an award from the Southeast
Federal Laboratory Consortium. The R&D 100 Awards are presented annually by
R&D Magazine in recognition of
the year’s top 100 technological innovations. Piranha was developed by Potok,
Jim Treadwell, Mark Elmore, Brian Klump, Robert Patton, and Joel Reed.
