Connotate Readies Undercover Agents

New Brunswick, NJ-based Web search technology provider Connotate is incorporating "intelligent learning" technology into its Information Agent Suite to further automate data collection and distribution, officials tell Inside Market Data.

Information agents are software programs used to find and aggregate content from across the Web. The vendor is currently developing new interfaces to its IAS platform, and a new library of agents, both of which should be completed by the end of summer, says sales vice president Donald Williams.

The interfaces mean that once a user has visited a Web site and set up an agent to collect information from that site by defining how data should be collected and categorized—for example, what should be a headline, and what should be a summary—the platform will in future recognize any new information that appears on the site and apply the correct formatting.

The information could then be sent to data vendors to be incorporated and redistributed, to a news publisher's editorial system to be incorporated into stories, or to be used by financial analysts or research firms to support trading applications, funds, or proprietary trading strategies. "It's about quickly acquiring the data to leverage ideas," Williams says.

The vendor is also working on a new library, which acts as a repository for all the agents that a customer creates so that they can be organized by categories such as subject, author or output, then re-used and applied to other data sources. Williams says the upcoming release makes some functions easier, such as the ability to set up complex schedules so that someone else in a company can re-use an agent but configure it with different timings. Also, users of the new library will be able to search for agents created by other users according to sector or author, to find software agents most useful for their own purpose.