Ever have a moment in the office where you had done all the research for a major report, but didn't have a clue how to find it or put any of it together coherently? Ever daydream while attempting to write said report about a robot that could just do it all for you?
Congrats, technology is officially one step closer to making your dream a reality! Thanks to Pacific Northwest National Laboratories - a US Department of Energy research laboratory - people can now do all the research they want, without actually having to organize any of it themselves. FADE, or Fused Analytical Desktop Environment, is computer software that can sort through thousands of different digital documents, including word documents, e-mails and PDFs, to cluster the information into themed groups.
Say, for instance, you are doing research and need information on terrorism, the United States government, and the President. You can run a keyword search and the FADE software will cluster and organize the documents into a visual chart according to their content in relation to the keywords.
As a whole, the program provides data ingest, data transformation, data organization, collaboration and analytical capabilities. Content management and collaboration also allow context and acquired knowledge to be shared.
"It's kind of like Windows, with files and folders and sub-folders, and you can link folders to various terms," said Metatomix Chief Technical Officer Howard Greenblatt. "In addition, we're not actually duplicating documents each time we put them in a folder; we're linking to them. It's a much easier way to access documents and organize. Now you have all the documents filed directly, and you can use the other tools available in suite once you have started linking to particular categories, and it will allow you to kind of automate the whole process."
Visual of how FADE works.
Ok, so FADE may not be a robot that can do your work while you watch Youtube, but it certainly could help you cut a lot of corners.
Pacific Northwest recently sold their FADE software to the Massachusetts-based company Metatomix for an undisclosed amount of money. Metatomix, which specializes in semantic integration technologies, is currently incorporating their own software technology with FADE and hopes to release an office-friendly version of it in the next six to eight months.
In the meantime, various government agencies are using prototypes of this innovative organizational program to organize the data in criminal records and make it faster to look up specific offenders. In short, FADE software can make the millions of files the government controls more manageable and accessible to people between the agencies, and make it easier for people to find the data they want in record time (thus bringing the era of the sexy research librarian to a close).
Metatomix was not able to comment on exactly which agencies will be using the program. But once the company's version is on the market, FADE software will be more readily available for everyone to use and also include a product help-line.
"We've already got a lot of software integrated into justice applications, and we already have a lot of local government contracts in different states," Greenblatt said. "We see integrating FADE software as a way to provide additional features with deployments we already have, and even moving up to a more federal level."
The next stop for technology: FADE software teams up with Google for total world information domination. Now if someone can just invent a way to organize a woman's outfits...
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