Keener eye for the spy guys

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are among the first government agencies to license the newest version of Convera's Screening Room, an optional component to Convera's RetrievalWare enterprise search platform that also searches text and audio data.

Used in conjunction with RetrievalWare, Screening Room delivers real-time capture, encoding, analysis and cataloguing of video, in addition to closed caption text, text generated by speech-to-text converters and other metadata over corporate intranets and extranets.Convera explains that Version 3.0 allows searching of vast multimedia repositories, and eliminates the need for analysts, archivists and general users to watch or play an entire video when only a small clip is needed by leading the searcher directly to the relevant portion of the video.

Included within Screening Room 3.0 are new security features to authenticate users and control the viewing and editing of sensitive video materials. To build the new Screening Room 3.0 enterprise security features Convera leveraged security features from its RetrievalWare product, which has been used to search sensitive government information for years.

"Multimedia search will grow in importance to enterprises, particularly for managing and accessing valuable marketing materials, or training materials, " said Susan Feldman, Research Vice President for Content Technologies, IDC. "The addition of enterprise security features to Convera's Screening Room product enhances its usefulness to both government and commercial enterprises."

Convera says some 250 government agencies worldwide, including over 100 intelligence and law enforcement operations, have adopted RetrievalWare as their discovery platform for security applications, intelligence gathering and evidence analysis. RetrievalWare searches across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information.