FBI Selects Convera's "RetrievalWare" for data sharing

A press release that went out today... Just FYI...

FBI Selects Convera to Provide Support for
Discovery and Sharing of Information
Within New FBI Investigative Data Warehouse




RetrievalWare® to Increase Information Sharing Among Law
Enforcement, Intelligence and Homeland Security Communities



Vienna, Va., October 20, 2003 - Convera (Nasdaq: CNVR), a leading provider of search and categorization software for enterprises and government agencies, today announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has selected Convera’s RetrievalWare as a search and categorization platform within the Agency’s new Investigative Data Warehouse. The initial value of the deployment of Convera’s software is approximately $1.5 million.

After the events of September 11th, the FBI created a sophisticated Secure Collaborative Operational Prototype Environment (SCOPE) with a counter-terrorism and intelligence data repository. RetrievalWare was selected by the FBI for the repository to improve the sharing of intelligence information and collaboration across multiple government agencies, enhancing the government's ability to prevent terrorist attacks. RetrievalWare will work with other tools to help FBI analysts identify critical pieces of intelligence within the massive information repository that they use to drive investigative and intelligence activities. Specific RetrievalWare capabilities required by the FBI for the project include extensive security options, real-time message profiling, breadth of language support, multimedia search, scalability and powerful new dynamic classification capabilities.

Information sharing among intelligence agencies -- essential to national security -- will be bolstered by RetrievalWare’s ability to cut through enormous amounts of data to find minute details agents need to respond to possible homeland security threats. RetrievalWare will also ensure FBI agents can search authorized information in other agency databases, in addition to the FBI’s own data repository.

The new Intelligence Data Warehouse system will provide a Web-based, collaborative environment for hundreds of agents who will eventually analyze over one billion text, video, audio and image files. Using RetrievalWare, agents can compare and contrast relevant information and find missing links by securely accessing the Agency’s Investigative Data Warehouse.


RetrievalWare met the FBI’s stringent search and classification requirements that included:

Dynamic Classification - RetrievalWare will be tailored for the FBI’s document classification system to meet the agency’s specific user requirements. RetrievalWare’s dynamic classification improves search and discovery quality by presenting search results in personalized views enabled by visual discovery techniques that reduce the time required to find and share knowledge. This gives the FBI freedom and flexibility to dynamically organize and view essential information assets, providing more efficient information exploration and problem solving capabilities. With dynamic classification, agents will define personalized criteria for information of interest and be notified when relevant information enters the data warehouse.

Language Breadth - The FBI will also use RetrievalWare to search in nearly 50 languages, including European, Asian and Middle Eastern languages. Convera’s advanced concept search technology will be utilized to search many of the languages. RetrievalWare’s cross-lingual cartridges will offer agents the option of asking a question in one language and receiving the answer in another - a unique feature and useful for the FBI. For example, an agent could construct a search query in English and receive results in French or German.

Security - Essential for the FBI’s sensitive and worldwide operations, RetrievalWare offers complete document level security, as well as cross-repository and cross-platform security.

Multimedia Search (Text, Image, Video, Paper and Other) - RetrievalWare will allow agents to reach into and search a variety of multimedia assets representing, for example, surveillance videotapes; forensic reports such as blood, fingerprint and DNA; automated case files; credit card transactions; terrorist watch lists; wiretaps; bank records; credit card transactions; automated case files; and even local law enforcement arrest reports.

Industry-Specific Taxonomies - A pivotal agency protecting national security, the FBI has its own “language” for operations around the world. Convera’s industry-specific taxonomy and semantic network cartridges help ensure thousands of FBI mission-specific concepts and terms are used to optimize search, discovery accuracy, relevancy and personalization for the Agency.



About Convera’s RetrievalWare 8
RetrievalWare 8 is Convera’s newest offering, a comprehensive knowledge discovery platform that helps large organizations automate their knowledge management and discovery processes using an infrastructure that is easily optimized for specific industry and government agency applications. RetrievalWare 8 integrates Convera’s proven scalable enterprise search with industry-specific taxonomies and new categorization and dynamic classification capabilities, delivering powerful techniques for searching, navigating and discovering knowledge, including hidden relationships, patterns and trends. With RetrievalWare 8, customers now have a single integrated platform that categorizes and organizes all content including unstructured text, image, video and paper assets, in addition to a variety of structured data sources.



About Convera
Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages. More than 800 customers in 33 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more. For more information, contact Convera at 800-788-7758, via e-mail at info@convera.com or on the Web at www.convera.com.