Cataphora Technology Technology Overview
Technology Overview
Advanced, innovative and practical software technology is at the heart of what we do here at Cataphora. From the very first we have invented and patented novel ideas and put them to work helping our clients. We combine our own technology with "the best of the rest" – proven techniques, which have stood the test of time – to provide the very best products and services. And our team of software engineers, mathematicians, and linguists continues to find new ways of improving them.
The principal insight on which the company was founded is that it is not possible to truly understand what has happened or is happening in an organization just by searching through some number of email messages or electronic documents. The insight that communications are fragmented and cover a wide spectrum of media stood us in good stead when we were founded eight years ago, and has never been truer than today, when such applications as instant messaging, social media websites like Facebook, and microblogging service Twitter are in the ascendant.

Sophisticated model
Cataphora's innovative idea was that technology was needed that could re-stitch these small fragmentary communications into a coherent data whole that would allow proper interpretation and more accurate search. In so doing, we shifted the search paradigm from documents to people. That's a critical step forward: After all, documents don't cause problems, people do.

We realized from the outset that the key to understanding the behavior of an organization and the individuals of which it is comprised is the creation of a model of that behavior. The model is derived from the myriad electronic records any organization creates as it goes about its business. The model starts by automatically depicting these records and the relationships between them: that an email is a response to an instant message for example, or that a document is attached to an email message. Our technology also creates additional objects and relationships, such as actor groups and text blocks, which help provide additional insight into the patterns of behavior of the organization. Necessarily, the model for a typical organization is very large and complex, representing millions of items and relationships.

From this model, we automatically derive causal chains of events: sequences of electronic data items where the items are direct consequences of each other. For example, we may determine that the dissemination of a document gave rise to an exchange of email and instant messages, followed by a phone call and a meeting. We call such sequences Discussions™. From these, it is possible to see the context of each item, and to gain an unprecedented insight into how events unfolded, as revealed by the trail of electronic records of all kinds.

Advanced analytics
The richness of this model allows us to derive sophisticated analytics that go far beyond statistical measurements of the data to provide insights into the behavior of individuals and organizations that are quite simply unavailable with other solutions. Our analytics range from modeling habitual behavior to assessing the closeness of social relationships, to deviations from standard business processes, to detecting unusual patterns of 'holes' in the data.

These analytics – many of them invented by us and patented – bring the model to life, highlighting the key events and individuals of interest. Our analytics provide the sharpest and most actionable insight into the important features to be found in the data and are invaluable for monitoring current activity for indiscretions, or for reviewing past behavior in the course of an investigation or litigation.

Continuing innovation
Our innovation continues to rise to the challenge of customer demands. We have, arguably, more experience than anyone else on the planet at developing and deploying sophisticated technologies for understanding organizational behavior. We continue to develop better technologies, and better ways to make them available to our customers in practical and useful ways.

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