Technology

Design principles

InfoTame's design follows the principles of scalability, flexibility and ease of use. These concepts are applied by utilizing a modular design based on common programming standards and algorithms which scale to multiple terabytes of data without sacrifice of performance.

Technical Characteristics

InfoTame's technical characteristics make it easy to implement in a multitude of environments:

• It is a non-intrusive application with a small footprint
• File agents reside on the InfoTame server and require read-only permissions
• The architecture is flexible and scalable (from reading data files from CDs to integration into a network)
  • Stand-alone server - static data loads via CD
  • File-server architecture - for small number of users, static or dynamic data
  • Client-server architecture - Enterprise capabilities, dynamic data, LAN and WAN access
• Information content - from tens of Megabytes to Terabytes

• Special text formats can be easily derived from the input's different development tools for easy adjustment or creation of converters for other types of data and RDBMS
• Autoloader program that runs in the background and loads new data into the statistical database
• Any information sources (from e-mail and Internet to common diskettes)
• Flexible settings allow multiple data input formats
  • The system contains converters of frequent formats
    • Simple text
    • RTF
    • DOC
    • HTML

Application Architecture

The flexibility of InfoTame is achieved through a modular design. The application architecture is split into three major modules:

• Loader Module (consists of three main components):
  • Adjustable converters - Adjustable converters can be custom tailored to load different forms of text based information and data fields
  • Initial loader - The Initial loader will perform the initial set-up and loading of the data
  • Autoloader - The Autoloader will continuously update ITee with new information while maintaining database integrity
• Analytical Engine
  • Analytical database - The analytical database contains the representation of the original data, prepared for complex analyses
  • Search and Analysis Engine - Core programs, which perform the search and analysis on the analytical database
• Interface Module (consists of three components):
  • End-user interface - Currently accessible through a Web browser. Can be easily modified or substituted with a custom interface
  • Administration interface - Handles all administrative tasks from user administration and security to database administration
  • Monitoring Modules - Performance monitoring and data load monitoring functions
    

Technical Requirements

The current minimum requirements for an InfoTame installation with data in the gigabyte range are as follows:

• Hardware
  • Windows NT/2000 server (SP2 )
  • 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended)
  • 2GB storage + 3x planned database size
• Software
  • Microsoft IIS 5.0 (web server