ISYS

Odyssey Development is a wholly Australian owned, private company, established in 1988.

Odyssey Development specialises in knowledge management and information delivery software for corporate networks and Internet based enterprise systems. This ranges from the most simple single user requirement of seeking to find an e-mail or document, to multinational corporations sharing information and knowledge across the world.

All ISYS products are centred on the core ISYS indexing and retrieval technology, which provides the powerful and flexible search functionality inherent in the entire ISYS range.

ISYS:web is targeted at a professional audience, not the general consumer. ISYS:web is appropriate for any industry where large volumes of diverse and disparate information need to be accessed rapidly. This ranges from a court room environment where solicitors, barristers and judges share and interrogate evidence, trial transcripts and pleadings, to a Local Council offering search to its rate payers of council meetings and local law.

ISYS:web is designed to provide a single point of access to a heterogeneous environment, allowing a user to access information from across the office or across the world. A single search can compile references from global and personal e-mail folders, SQL databases, word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, XML data, web pages, Lotus Notes and contact management systems in less than a second.

ISYS:web projects the power of integrated knowledge management into intranet and/or Internet websites, e-commerce and portal developments.

ISYS:web offers a fully customisable web server equipped with state of the art search technology to create the complete knowledge management solution. Able to support over 125 file formats, ISYS:web features dynamic HTML conversion, automated personalised information delivery and hit highlighting, creating a vehicle to leverage opportunities, maximise innovation and avoid the loss of knowledge assets.

ISYS:spider adds the ability to be selective about knowledge acquired from the Internet. Defying the enormous quantity of irrelevant information, spider lets you focus on quality sources to add value to the corporate portal. This information, once carefully selected, can be automatically updated and seamlessly integrated into the single stream of information access via ISYS:web.

ISYS:rich-html presents non-HTML files in their native format through a web-browser, maximising user comprehension. It also dynamically generates a temporary table of contents for documents viewed through the web browser, allowing for easy document navigation.

ISYS:web’s multiple process architecture makes it extremely fault tolerant due to internal process delegation and because of this design, it also provides optimal performance on multiple CPU servers.

Product at a glance
Product type	Application
Target Industry Sectors	Banking: Commerce: Communications: Education: Health: Mining and resources: Research: Transportation: Utilities: Government, legal, recruitment and law enforcement
Fault tolerance	Fault tolerant
Innovation indicators	All indicators flagged Business Advantage Breaking new ground Earth shrinking
Contact for more information	Terry Clift
Performance indicators	All indicators flagged Quality system Customer support Standards and codes compliance Fully supported product Professionally executed design Real world design Beta tested User benefits
Contact for more information	Ian Davies
Potential indicators	Structured for growth Identified potential markets Award recognition Successful track record international collaborators
Contact for more information	Sophia Lee

One of the greatest assets of a company or organisation is its tacit and explicit knowledge. In a collaborative information sharing environment, where staff have access to company wide information and can interrogate that knowledge base swiftly and efficiently through accurate, intelligent searching, all the above mentioned points become significant advantages.

ISYS:web is a web server in its own right as well as a search tool. ISYS:web makes no demands on the way documents are filed or how an organisation manages its data. By simply telling ISYS:web where the information is, a website can be up and running in a matter of hours. ISYS:web converts all 125 supported formats to HTML on the fly. This means that the pile of word documents, databases and other file formats residing in computers all over the office or all over the world are served up to a browser instantly and the document is not altered in any way.

ISYS:web also exhibits a number of features which break new ground in the field of search technology. These include:

When a search is performed within ISYS:web, the user has the option to invoke Outline Browse for the documents they view. Once invoked, Outline Browse will serve up to the browser only a contextualised view of the relevant sections of the document. The user can then view the extracts of the document to determine if it is what they need. They can expand an extract in either direction to view surrounding text. Once it is decided that the user wants to read the document in its entirety, ISYS will then download the entire document.

This feature is very important with large files. With a result list of 40 odd documents, for example, needing to wait for each one to download before determining if it’s appropriate to ones requirements is far too time consuming.

Outline Browse is innovative as it saves end user time as well as valuable bandwidth.

Few search engines feature hit highlighting but ISYS:web is innovative because not only does it highlight hits, it offers hit to hit navigation.

When you perform a query within ISYS:web, (whether it is a natural language query, a Boolean search or simply a phrase or word), when the relevant document is served to the browser the word or multiple words that were key to your search are highlighted in the text. This immediately identifies the relevant part of the document.

ISYS:web's omni-directional navigation takes you to the first part of a document that is relevant to your search and lets you navigate from expression to expression, document to document and through inferred or explicit document linkages. Users access the intertextuality of the result list, which is resolved dynamically.

Automatic document association can be established by providing ISYS:web with a set of rules relating to document file naming conventions. ISYS:web also offers a dynamically generated virtual table of contents at the beginning of documents to allow for document structured navigation.

Click on this thumbnail image for a full screen view. Close the browser to return to this page.

ISYS:web allows you to take a unified view of applications that are fundamentally different in nature . For example, it will allow you to search and view an SQL record in the same manner as you would search and view a Word document or an email or a spreadsheet. This creates a single tool for interrogation of a wide range of applications rather than a range of separate tools for each type of application.

ISYS:web has earth shrinking potential because it gives people remote access to important information. As an example, a farmer sitting in his house in the middle of country Tasmania can search Hansards from Tasmanian Parliament that have been typed that afternoon into MS Word. That same farmer can check up on the judgement of his brother in a Sydney court through the NSW Attorney General’s Caselaw site and could investigate the latest research on Cancer from the best US institutions through Peter MacCallum’s cancer portal, using ISYS:web’s website spidering feature.

Odyssey Development offers enthusiastic and exceptional product support. With offices in three countries, Odyssey can give almost round the clock support. Odyssey’s global team of customer support staff are able generalists in the wider field of computing as well as experts in ISYS products.

The need of ISYS:web to interface to a wide diversity of heterogeneous formats demands that Odyssey is compliant with most major standards in codes. As such ISYS:web is compliant with the standards relevant to today’s industry including WC3 conventions such as HTML, as well as XML, ANSI SQL and also vendor specific standards such as Microsoft BIFF and Adobe Acrobat.

Odyssey Development has a professional team of highly skilled programmers with many years experience in search engine technology. Included among them are University lecturers and technical authors. These impassioned individuals are fully conversant with the latest programming methodologies complimented by a wealth of experience over decades.

Click on the thumbnail image for a full screen view or visit the ISYS website where there is a user showcase demonstrating a range of public sites that utilise ISYS:web. Close the browser window to return to this page.

ISYS:web provides a range of benefits to visitors to public websites as well as company employees. ISYS:web offers high speed, accurate, flexible search and retrieval. Intelligent searching features recognise and interpret dates and numbers, pre-compensate for typing or scanning errors, understand word forms and tenses and the advanced language interpretation option automatically refines queries in order to supply more accurate results.

ISYS:web is designed for international use. It has inbuilt architecture to make localisation easy. It supports over thirty languages including Canadian French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Cyrillic Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Thai, Italian, Bahasa and Arabic. For the Asian languages it supports both MBCS and Unicode. ISYS:web also allows you to search a foreign language and English in the same query.

Odyssey Development has offices in strategic markets throughout the world including USA and UK and has established lucrative export markets in these regions. The US office actually contributes two-thirds of the group revenue.

Odyssey Development also has projects underway with international partners to extend the language options of the products and to provide more sales opportunities. Currently Odyssey is collaborating with firms in Canada and Spain to create translated User Interfaces for French and Spanish respectively and Odyssey has just been accepted into the EDS Global Partnership Programme, which will hopefully provide opportunities for more export sales in Europe, Asia and the USA.

ISYS:web has also been recognised by the Powerhouse Museum as one of the Top One Hundred Innovations of the twentieth century.

Odyssey Development is an Australian owned, private company, established in 1988.

Odyssey has approximately 40,000 customers worldwide, ranging from single users through to the USA Federal Bureau of Prisons with over 10,000 users.

Odyssey has offices in Sydney Australia, Denver USA and Chester UK with distribution arrangements in New Zealand, England, Singapore, Canada, South Africa and Holland.

Two-thirds of Odyssey’s revenue comes from exports to the USA. With the success of the US wholly owned subsidiary, Odyssey opened a new office in the UK in November 2000.

Sophia Lee
General Manager Marketing & Administration
sophia.lee@isys.com.au

Odyssey Development

Suite 102, 10-12 Clarke Street CROWS NEST NSW 2065

Phone: (02) 9439 5800
Fax: (02) 9439 8569

Aerospace	Medical/Forensic	Defence
Law Enforcement	Science	Banking & Finance
Breweries	Research	Universities
Government	Insurance	Corporations Large & Small
Mining	Building	Legal
IT	Recruitment	Telecommunications