Storage Tip: Identify data pattern recognition

Send your Storage question to David Hill today! | See other Storage tips

What seems to be the problem? If you had your druthers, you would never want to produce a copy of key parts of your enterprise's data and deliver it to a third party to satisfy a subpoena as part of a lawsuit. But neither you nor your company has that option. You must produce that data. Remember that the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are more explicit about what you need to do with electronically-stored information (ESI). But your obligations do not end with producing the required information. Your obligation is also to help put your legal department in the best possible position given the available evidence. And that may not be easy.



What do you need to know? You can help your legal department select and use the proper software to review the data. There are a large number of search engines that do a capable job in doing key word searches of a large number of documents. You must examine the different tools, but you should be able to find one that meets your needs. And in many cases the tools may be sufficient to meet your needs.



However, there are some cases where that approach is insufficient. The traditional approach is a document-by-document search. But what if information is missing or there is other relevant information than that subpoenaed? What if e-mail threads are not sufficient sources of information?



Cataphora is a software company that helps enterprises deal with high-end investigations where recognition of behavioral patterns -- not just document-by-document search -- is necessary. (Cataphora briefed me as an industry analyst on its product and service.) Cataphora doesn't look for the smoking gun (which may not be there), but rather the smoking hole. If you read "The Adventure of the Silver Blaze," Sherlock Holmes commented on the dog that barked in the night. Dr. Watson was puzzled as no dog had barked in the night. And that was the strange thing according to Holmes. For example, an employee of interest neither received nor sent e-mails for several days, but created new calendar events. That would be a strange thing. It would not be a smoking gun, but it would be a smoking pattern.



Cataphora provides its software as a service (SaaS). Sophisticated multigraph mathematics, such as is used in social networking, is at the heart of its analytical capabilities. Cataphora uses mathematics and computational linguistics to help defendants in complex civil litigation investigations.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine