Meta data capture start-up shows stuff at info 360
NEW YORK - There has been a lot of talk in technology circles recently about the concept of managing “big data.” Big data basically defines the rapidly growing amount of information that enterprise systems are being inundated with due to increasing electronic communication and transactions. Of course, paper documents, by their nature mostly fall outside the realm of big data—that is unless they are imaged and the information on them is somehow translated into a format a data management system can understand.

That’s where Pingar comes in. The New Zealand-based ISV develops technology in the area of meta data extraction. Its software leverages natural language processing and semantics to automatically capture meta data from unstructured documents, including document images to which OCR has been already applied.

“It’s fairly straightforward to capture basic meta data like a file name, an author, or the date a file was created,” said Owen Allen, a former senior product manager for SharePoint ISV partners at Microsoft who joined Pingar late last year. (He is familiar with a lot of people in the DIR community from his days at Microsoft as well as his time spent as an independent consultant for SharePoint ISVs.) “It’s getting to that next level that is the challenge.”

The second level of meta data can include introducing information like people mentioned in a document and/or places, business names, e-mail addresses, and credit card numbers. Pingar has the ability to extract 14 such “entities,” as it calls these fields. “Due to our software’s intelligence, we have the ability to understand if ‘Washington’ is a name or a place, for example,” said Allen.

Pingar was founded in 2007 and initially launched a product last year. It offers its product both as a hosted service and an SDK. It has developed a SharePoint integration through which users can submit documents to the Pingar software directly from a SharePoint interface. Pingar will extract meta data fields that correspond to the fields in the SharePoint library and populate them. Users can set up new fields and apply the Pingar technology to the entire library.

Allen stressed that Pingar is not married to SharePoint. “It can work with any ECM system,” he said. “We are also looking to integrate with applications in areas like forensics, accounting, and e-discovery.

“We are not planning to sell our technology as a complete product. It’s a tool that can be used to help other applications perform better. We are currently looking for ISV and SI partners.”

For more information: www.pingar.com