Search Tools Product Report

Visual Net from Antarcti.ca

Warning: this service has been discontinued

As of July, 2005, this tool has become a business analytics system, rather than a search engine.

Platform: remote search service (ASP)
Price: initially, around $5,000 per month

• Provides visual mapping of data to group related topics (see SearchTools Report on Visualization of Search Results)
• Uses both two-dimensional and three-dimensional display techniques.
• Integrates text files with XML and SQL databases and other structured data
• Designed for multilingual information and multiple character sets
• Uses metadata collected by spidering and existing hierarchical taxonomies.
• Scalable to millions of documents.
• Enterprise version available.
• Designed by Tim Bray, co-author of the XML recommendation and builder of the Open Text and PAT search engines

Articles & Reviews

• Unstructured Data Management: the elephant in the corner (guest or customer access required) the451 Report, November 2002 by Nick Patience and Rachel Chalmers
  Discusses the business aspects of the company, markets (enterprise storage and supply-chain management), competition and the technology. Product could be a significant value for the chosen markets, but sales are challenging.
  
  
• Visualize It: Antarcti.ca Puts Content on the Map EContent Magazine; August 2001 by Greg R. Notess
  Covers the background of the product, including Tim Bray and his ideas about visualization, the public demo sites, the 2D and 3D versions, and business issues.
  
  
• Start-up offers data visualization Network World Fusion; June 20, 2001 by Carolyn Duffy Marsan.
  Provides examples of enterprise use of Visual Net, such as human resources and venture capital distribution.
  
  
• Antarcti.ca debuts new visual search tools eWeek; June 15, 2001 by Dennis Callaghan 
  Describes the product and quotes a customer describing the value of the visual interface, particularly for general searches and discovering information.
  
  
• This Map needs no folding NetworkWorld Canada; February 13, 2001 by Carly Suppa
  Describes the Visual Net mapping value within an enterprise, including analyzing the quantity and quality of pages within clusters, and allowing employees to explore network resources, supplementing search engines. Analyst Patrick O'Kelly says he was pleasantly surprised by thought-provoking and useful suggestions based on information in proximity to related items.
  

Examples

• Map.net - plots two million web sites from the Open Directory Project onto a map of Antarctica.
• PubMed (US National Library of Medicine Medline database)
• Canada Venture Capital Deal Map shows industry types and how much venture capital they are receiving.