Organizing and managing e-commerce and knowledge assets. Intelligently. Automatically.

Colony

Transcom Software Inc. is committed to developing

dynamic, intelligent, interactive solutions for a Web-

enabled world with technology based on natural

collaborative systems. Transcom will continue to

provide advanced software solutions for all content

management, e-commerce, education and

entertainment needs in the New Internet Economy.

Vin Hillsdon, the Chairman of Transcom, has extensive experience in deploying

computer-based decision making technologies and is totally committed to building

automated, self-learning, intelligent solutions relevant to the New Economy of a Web-

enabled world.

Transcom has assembled a highly talented development team to create innovative

software for business applications. The team has a deep knowledge and experience

in Agent technology and relationship management approaches and other advanced

software techniques. This team created the proprietary technology behind Transcom’s

products: Automated Intelligent Decision-Making® (AIDM®).

AIDM is the core of Transcom’s flagship software, Colony. AIDM provides the

technology that makes it possible for Colony to find, organize, refine and disseminate

business-critical information automatically and for its users to develop and share the

knowledge needed to move the business forward.

Transcom’s pioneering applications derived from years of practical experience in

inference, probabilistic reasoning, induction, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence and neural

networks are used in three key processes - Gathering Content, Managing Content and

Delivering Content - which are at the core of Colony's functionality.

Transcom Software Inc.

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Transcom Software Inc

(Transcom) was founded in

1996 by Vin Hillsdon, who had

previously founded Teckvest

Ltd, a recognized world leader

in knowledge management

systems for the financial,

currency, and commodity

markets. Teckvest perfected

its expert automated trading

systems in gobal markets,

providing their effectiveness

in profitable trading over 14

years.

White Paper Abstract

In globally competitive markets, the most successful businesses will be

those that most effectively find, refine, share, organize and use critical

information.

With Transcom Software’s Colony, users can effectively manage the ever-growing

wealth of raw, unstructured data and information that exists on corporate intranets

and the World Wide Web. Transcom created its Automated Intelligent Decision

Making® (AIDM®) technology and built Colony around it to enable the use of

information to build knowledge for application to business-critical processes,

including customer and supplier relationships. Colony’s technology can help

develop interactive relationships between suppliers, customers and workers

within an organization.

Colony helps to ensure the full potential of these assets can be realised so

the return a business can achieve from its investment in human and infrastructure

resources is maximized. Gathering data and information is only the first step in

realising this return through intelligent knowledge management. To be useful,

information needs to be analyzed, categorized and disseminated to every one

who can use it without subjecting the user to information overload.

These are the tasks Colony was designed to address.

©2000 Transcom Software Inc. All rights reserved.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Transcom

Software Inc on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Transcom

must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a

commitment on the part of Transcom. Transcom cannot guarentee the accuracy of any

information presented after the date of publication.

This White Paper is for informational purposes only. TRANSCOM MAKES NO

WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLICIT, IN THIS DOCUMENT.

Product or company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective

owners,

Transcom Software Inc.

European Head Office:

TransCom Software (Ireland) Ltd.

11 Anglesea Street

Dublin 2

Ireland

Tel: (353) 1 667 1200

Fax: (353) 1 667 1284

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Us Sales Office:

TransCom Software Inc.

1275 4th Street, PMB #635

Santa Rosa, CA 95404

United States

Asia Pacific:

TCom Australia Pty Ltd

Oxley House

25 Donkin Street

West End, Qld 4101

Australia

Tel: (61) 500 826 669

Fax: (61) 500 826 670

Internet: www.transcomsoft.com

E-mail: sales@transcomsoft.com

This Agent Network can replace much of the human activity and interaction

required to identify, analyze, manage and act on information, providing

individual users, work groups and the enterprise with an automated, dynamic,

intelligent, customizable and self-learning solution.

The flexibility of AIDM-based Colony allows it to be deployed in a

comprehensive range of Internet-based applications including –

• Enterprise Portals as a broad, intelligent knowledge and customer relationship

management solution for network-based organizations. Colony gives its users

access to every internal and external information source that can be reached

from the network.

• Vertical Portals as a solution to address specific market sectors. Colony’s

intelligent information handling features make it particularly suitable for on-line

publishing applications and content delivery services such as those used in the

legal, educational, entertainment and recruitment sectors and by government

departments.

• Meta-Portals as the platform for on-line shopping malls and other applications

which can bring otherwise unrelated businesses and organizations together on

a single Web site to address a particular market.

• Super-Portals as the platform for interactive community-based origin and

destination sites featuring topic-based links to appropriate chat rooms, message

boards, classified advertising, auctions, community shops, personal Web spaces

and other appropriate content.

Colony can be deployed as a complete off-the-shelf solution or as an overlay

to existing Web sites, adding additional functionality and adding features

such as customer support and interactive news.

Colony has been designed to leverage existing infrastructure by using a standard

Windows NT platform including applications. Colony supports any ODBC compliant

database and is accessed by a standard Web browser. Using Microsoft’s standard

IIS (Internet Information Server), Colony is implemented through ISAPI (Internet

Server Application Programming Interface) DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries).

Colony: Overview

4

The Automated Intelligent

Decision-Making® (AIDM®)

system at the heart of

Transcom’s technology

manages a Network of

hierarchically structured

autonomous software

Agents, each with a different

task and each having task-

specific levels of reasoning

and decision making power. Col

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Colony is designed as an environment. Its essence is a virtual

representation of an autopoietic system, which applies the framework of

social systems and the rules of social interaction to bring order and structure

to information and its sources. Colony implements the framework for this

environment through its proprietary Automated Intelligent Decision-Making

technology. (For a comprehensive discussion on autopoietic systems see

http://www.acm.org./sigois/auto/AT&Soc.html.)

Colony uses AIDM-based software Agents to find, track, archive, retrieve, refine,

aggregate and present information. Each team member on the network is assigned

a customizable Agent that works as a personal assistant to gather information in

Categories of interest. This information is then automatically shared through personal

Web pages with other team members who have subscribed to the same Categories.

Every resource accessible from the network – including the Internet – is used

as an information source so the content delivered by Colony’s Agents is always

comprehensive as well as current and timely. In addition to information, the Agents

gather value-adding “meta information” including the author of a document, its

location, creation date, and a context-based description of its content. The Agents can

also automatically identify experts on particular topics within an organization.

Colony overlays existing Windows NT infrastructure – including applications and a

standard Web browser – with an intelligent whole-of-business system powered by

Transcom’s AIDM technology. Colony integrates cleanly with financial applications,

stock management, back-end and communications systems.

After raw information has been analyzed and categorized, Colony disseminates it across

the network to subscribers to the category so everyone is working with the same

timely and relevant knowledge. This helps prevent redundant effort, while increasing

productivity and maintaining business focus.

Colony: An environment for managing with intelligence and knowledge

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The architecture of Colony

was designed to bring order

to an organization’s chaotic

information universe, enabling

truly effective teamwork

between members of a

work group, between groups,

departments, business units

customers and suppliers.

Transcom believes in the evolution of technology

6

In the natural world, things

evolve gradually into more

complex forms better suited

to their environment. This is

why human intelligence

evolved with language and

language evolved to convey

ideas and facts about the

environment to other humans.

From the knowledge transfer

enabled by language, ever

more complex ideas could

be conceived and transferred

between humans. Through

many iterations, this process

has taken us to where we

are today.

Technology evolves by the same process. This evolution has driven the growth of large-

scale computer networks that transfer data around the world at the speed of light. But,

the volume and complexity of this data has grown beyond the capabilities of humans

on their own to manage it. In fact, traditional computer systems and current information

technology are no longer appropriate to handle the volume and diversity of information

that already exists and continues to grow.

Information technology itself needs to evolve so it can deal with this complex and

dynamic environment. Systems must be equipped with the necessary resources

to handle this information effectively and provide us with what we need in order

to assist our own technological evolution.

The only way to achieve this is to create technology that thrives in this ‘infosphere’.

This is what Transcom has done, and will continue to do. Tomorrow’s information

systems need to act intelligently on the information they process, while offering

suggestions to us about how best to proceed. These systems also need to

understand our goals and objectives as well as the actions they must take in order

to help us achieve them.

This is a complex task. It is no longer sufficient for computer systems to be mere

passive minders of our information. They need to be aware of our needs and intentions.

They must communicate to us the state of their world, and accept communication from

us about the state of ours. They need to understand our goals and take action to keep

us on target to reach those goals. Not only do they need to act intelligently, they need to

react intelligently. They need to become our technological friends and colleagues.

Transcom believes that through the unique combination of its original techniques and

the application of new paradigms, the first version of these intelligent, friendly systems

can be brought to users today.

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The problem of too much information

In today’s Web-enabled business world, it’s irrelevant if a business-critical fact is stored

on a server in London or in Sydney – it’s just as accessible as if it were stored in

the office next door. Easy access to information can provide users with a powerful

business-building tool and keep managers more informed about their business than

they have ever been. But, this ease of accessibility has brought problems of its own.

The ever-growing volume of raw data and unstructured information makes it increasingly

difficult to extract meaningful knowledge from it.

With too much information comes a new set of problems that managers need to

address. These include:

• Identifying information sources

• Gathering the information

• Verifying validity and accuracy

• Correlating and publishing the information

• Delivering information to relevant users

• Additional IT resources

• Additional employee training

• Security and access controls

• Maintaining currency of information

... and information overload which obscures critical information.

Managers need to make sense of millions of seemingly unrelated facts. They need to

build knowledge from all this raw unstructured information. And – they need a single

solution to streamline the process of growing and applying their new-found knowledge.

Colony can provide the solution for too much information so managers can focus on

the business’ core activities.

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Computers, networks and the

Internet have brought down

many of the barriers between

information and those who

can use it.

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The solution for too much information

Colony is a powerful overlay to an organization’s existing infrastructure – its features

leverage that infrastructure, current applications and human resources to maximize

the return on investment in them.

Colony’s unique set of components communicates and works together to produce

a meaningful solution to the problem of too much information. Colony’s key

components include –

• Web Crawler: Transcom’s proprietary Web crawler, LinkThingZ®, is powered

by AIDM-managed Agents. LinkThingZ reviews and categorizes Web sites and

conducts scheduled scans for new events or changes, using Personal Agents

to deliver information to each user.

• Contextraction®: Based on its context, a document is automatically analyzed

and categorized by Transcom’s own Contextraction technology which groups

similar documents into Categories and provides a brief context-based description.

Contextraction can also analyze the data in most databases and reorganize it

according to its context. Because it knows the prevailing contextual theme in any

document or information set, Contextraction can establish connections based on

common interest between users within a group.

• Search: Colony provides advanced search capabilities for over 250 standard file

types and all major databases, using key word, key phrase, and context. Searches

can be either global or restricted to Categories. The granularity of categorization

provided by Contextraction increases the efficiency of the searches.

• Personal Agents: Personalized information delivery is provided by Colony’s

AIDM-managed Personal Agents (Virtual Personal Assistants) that identify new

information or changes to old information, summarize the information and then

Categorize it. A customized Personal Agent will then advise its user via an email

alert and personal Web page that new information has become available.

• Central Information Repository: Colony’s central server does not store the

information, only hyperlink pointers to the source in databases, on file servers or

on Web sites, for example. These hyperlinks provide structure to an organization’s

information universe, enabling new team members to quickly become familiar

with this universe. Colony’s unique use of hyperlinks keeps storage requirements

to a minimum since only pointers to the location of information are stored, not

the information itself.

• Categories: Structure is added to raw information by organizing it into main and

sub-Categories, and then into subject Categories where all of the information’s links

are stored. These Categories provide an effective online information map that

users can access directly, giving them a dynamic view of the company’s

information universe.

Col

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Transcom Software’s Colony

provides a feature set designed

and crafted to address the

problems of finding, gathering,

analyzing, refining, organizing

and disseminating business-

critical information.

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• Forum: Colony’s user Forums based on Categories provide chat, messaging,

news updates, personal Web page options and scheduled reminders. The Forum

is managed automatically by the Administrator.

• Zapper®: Users build and customize their personal Web page with the Zapper.

After a page is created, Zapper sends it to a designated Colony Category where

other users can view it and link the page to their own personal page. This creates

an information-based community within the organization.

Colony’s key features

There are three key feature sets behind Colony’s intelligent knowledge

management abilities: Gathering content, Managing content and Delivering

content. These features are built primarily on the foundation provided

by Transcom Software’s Automated Intelligent Decision Making® (AIDM®)

technology.

The architecture of the AIDM technology is based on an interacting system of software

Agents inspired by the behavior of insect colonies. Colonies of social insects such as

ants, termites and bees behave in a much more organized manner than individual

insects could - this natural phenomenon is called "emergent behavior".

The result is that the colony collectively accomplishes much more than thousands of

insects working independently ever could. So it is with the AIDM-based Personal Agents

assigned to every Colony user – the activities of the individual Agents taken collectively

return a much greater result than could be expected from the activities of individual

Agents working independently.

Transcom describes this as a ‘bottom-up’ approach to information gathering:

The collective power of small actions moving upward through an organization

and interacting with other small actions causes a recognizable pattern to emerge.

That pattern is knowledge.

Because the Agents deliver to each member of a work group the same timely,

relevant and accurate information, the group also demonstrates the power of

collective behavior in its teamwork.

Colony’s information-handling and knowledge-building features make it well-suited

for specialist vertical markets. Categorization templates have already been developed

for the legal profession, recruitment agencies, pharmaceutical companies, government

agencies, real estate agents, the automotive industry and computer-based training

organizations. The modularity of Colony enables scaling from small businesses to

multinational enterprises.

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Gathering content

AIDM-based Agents roam all resources accessible from an organization’s

network – including extranets and the Internet – and aggregate information

relevant to specified Categories. Other Agents monitor events such as

changes to directory entries and trigger a reaction, while coordinating

Agents determine the appropriate reaction to these events.

The first stage in Colony’s content gathering process is to aggregate the raw data

and information content from accessible resources. Colony provides a number of Agents

and other mechanisms for gathering content –

Directory Monitors (D-Mons): Additions, changes, and deletions to a company’s

network directory structure are monitored by autonomous D-Mons Agents.

Unlike the actions of simple Web crawlers and spiders, D-Mons ensure that the

content held by Colony is always current. Each D-Mon is aware of the current state

of the directories being monitored so it knows when they have been changed and

logs these changes to an event database.

The D-Mon can monitor any directory that is visible to it – these can be shared

directories on any computer on the network or any directory on the computer on

which it is running. The D-Mon can be set to monitor some or all supported file

types, including HTML, standard Microsoft file types including Access, PowerPoint,

Word and Excel, ODBC compliant databases and plain text documents.

Content monitored by the D-Mons is mapped directly to an appropriate Category

within the primary Colony database, the Central Information Repository on the Colony

server, so information is automatically categorized by the location from which it

originated. If no Category is specified, Colony will automatically place the information

in the Category containing context-similar documents.

E-Mail Readers (Emas): Designated POP3 email accounts are monitored by Emas

Agents which publish the messages either in a pre-specified Category; they can also

automatically categorize the messages.

Emas can be used to implement automated customer support or any other system

where rapid, intelligent responses are required to inbound messages.

SQL Extractors (Sqlrs): Using queries at pre-set intervals, Sqlr Agents extract data

from SQL databases. This feature can be used to monitor trends or to notify users

about particular trigger events.

The end user does not require any knowledge of SQL queries and does not require

access to the database from where the data is extracted: only the Sqlr Agent needs

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access. Results from Sqlrs are published as HTML documents in the categories

specified by the Administrator.

The D-Mons, Emas and Sqlrs Agents work together as a comprehensive set of

information collection tools.

Event Coordinators (Ecos): When new events are detected by a D-Mon and then

written to the event log, control of the process switches to another group of agents,

the Ecos. These are responsible for deciding what method to use for the extraction

of data as a summary and a list of keywords from the source information – this data

is then transmitted back to the Central Information Repository.

Depending on the type of information, the Eco will deal with the extraction using

internal filters or by automatically loading the appropriate application and then extract

data using the accessible objects within the application’s document. The algorithm

used to extract the summary and keywords is proprietary – it is based on artificial

neural network technology and probabilistic inference techniques.

Once the extraction has been completed, the Eco sends the raw data extract to the

Colony server for processing. As well as sending the extract, the Eco also provides

information so the server can categorize it.

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LinkThingZ™: D-Mons and Ecos provide users with near real time data collection

and distribution, while Colony’s LinkThingZ robots provide the method for following Web

site links and placing the content of individual Web pages into Categories within the

Central Information Repository. LinkThingZ robots can be used to assist in research by

instructing it to search for information on specific topics.

LinkThingZ robots follow Web links as specified by the Colony Administrator and update

links whenever a new request is received. The activities of the robots can be restricted

to particular Web sites by specifying that only links with a known base URL be followed.

This prevents the robots from following links to external sites.

Each time the robot loads a new page it extracts the text from the page and sends it

back to the Colony server using HTTP. The Colony server then matches the information

received against the properties stored for each Category and places the content into the

Category that gives the best match using a number of pattern matching and fuzzy

logic algorithms. If the information is from a site where the contents have all been

placed in a main Category, only sub-Categories will be used to determine the end

placing of the information from this site. Colony’s LinkThingZ use as little bandwidth

as possible because they only re-access pages when the content changes.

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Zapper: Colony’s Web publishing tool, the Zapper, enables users with no knowledge

of HTML or Web page construction, to set up pages to be published on the

company intranet.

Zapper uses a simple point-and-click interface with which users can generate

single- and multiple-page sites customized with the user’s own input. Zapper

integrates cleanly with the rest of the Colony – once a site has been built, Zapper

decides which Category is appropriate for it.

When the site created with Zapper has been categorized and uploaded to the Web

server, users who are subscribed to that Category are automatically advised of the

new content.

Andy Roid: The latest addition to Colony is a module to add value to the results

from search engines such as Google, AltaVista and Go by searching their results

and finding those that most accurately match the original query. Andy Roid handles

natural language queries such as “Who is...” by pattern matching and then making

a fuzzy match.

Managing Content

Colony’s kernel handles all incoming information, analyzing, categorizing

and distributing it to all users to whom it is relevant. Security features

restrict the redistribution of sensitive information.

Once content has been gathered, categorized and linked on the Colony server, Content

Management is handled by the Central Information Repository’s utilities and tools.

Server Configuration Utility: Colony can easily be configured to work in any

environment supporting HTTP using Colony’s Server Configuration, which is also used

to customize system-specific attributes such as the location of server side applications,

the location of all the images and documents used by Colony, and the location of the

system’s homepage.

Other configurable options are the address of the Colony SMTP mail server and

all additional POP3 information such as the email address for system support.

The configuration utility also deals with the access information required by the SQL

Server database.

Implementation Manager: Colony provides an Implementation Manager to assist

with the initial setting up of Categories, which helps to ensure that the hierarchy of the

Colony implementation reflects the organization’s own hierarchy. The Implementation

Manager uses various validation procedures for checking dependencies and Categories

within the system.

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Category Manager: Colony provides the Category Manager to handle structural

changes to the Colony implementation. The Category Manager also provides

procedures for maintaining information details, chat information, messages, agents

and all information associated with a particular Category.

The Category Manager provides the system administrator with the tools to move

information from one Category to another and have all dependencies on the

Category’s location automatically updated.

The Category Manager also controls the association of particular phrases and key words

with a specific Category – the relevance of phrases and key words can be assigned

using Boolean attributes. By using this information to compute a ‘relevance factor’ Colony

is able to ‘best guess’ the Category in which a particular piece of information belongs

using fuzzy logic.

User Manager: Colony’s security and access control functions integrate with those

of Windows NT. The Colony User Manager provides a set of features that allow the

system administrator to assign users and groups access to specific Categories only.

Users who have been deleted from NT will automatically be removed from Colony

the next time the User Manager is run.

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Delivering Content

Personal Agents collect relevant content from accessible resources according

to the profile set by each user. Global searching locates information

by context while Category searching locates information within specific

Categories, enabling precise searches. Web pages built with the Zapper are

used to present content and email alerts advise when these pages have been

updated with new content.

Colony uses a standard Web browser to deliver content to users. The content delivered

is based on the Categories users nominate. The system administrator sets accessibility

restrictions so sensitive information can be protected from general viewing. Colony

handles these access controls dynamically so when an employee’s access rights are

altered, the information that is delivered to them is altered at the same time.

Personal Agents: Colony provides each registered user with an individual Personal

Agent with each subscription to information Categories. This enables every person

within an organization to be kept informed of all changes to the information in the

Categories they have subscribed to. Every time employees access their personal Colony

Web page, they are presented with all of the updates that have occurred in these

Categories.

Users can elect to be notified of changes by email but there is strict control over the

number of such messages sent by Colony – each user receives a single email alert with

a hyperlink to the personal page when the page changes.

Global Searching: As well as utilizing Agents for Gathering information, Colony

provides comprehensive, search facilities for finding information within the Central

Information Repository.

Global searching finds information located in any Category heading or within the

information held under any Category according to a single keyword or combinations

of keywords.

Rather than returning results as documents that just contain the specified keywords,

Colony returns results by placing the Category which most often contains the keywords

at the top of the result list. This context orientation of results ensures the relevancy

of the search’s results.

Users then select a found Category and will be shown the relevant, individual

documents in that Category.

Category Searching: Colony also supports keyword searching at the Category level

so searches can be narrowed down to very specific information. The functionality

of Category Searching is the same as Global Searching except that searches are

restricted to nominated Categories.

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Realizing the benefits of information assets

Transcom believes that raw data and information is the most valuable asset an

organization has in today’s Web-enabled business world. But, realizing its benefits

can be difficult: Task-critical information will be scattered across desktop PCs,

servers, mainframes and the Internet in hundreds of file formats created by a variety

of applications.

Colony has been designed to help business owners and managers realize the full

potential of this asset. This helps to ensure that the return a business can achieve from

its investment in human, infrastructure and information resources is maximized, as are the

opportunities to identify new business with both new and existing customers.

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