Information Collection

Any analysis or research starts by locating and ingesting available information in the field under focus. The information can be discovered from a number of sources, both public and private. Available data collectors allow ease of access for connecting to and consuming information continually as it becomes available. Some of the available collectors include the following:
1. The system can be setup to monitor any number of sites and/or specific URLs that are programmatically accessed to scrape information. While some sites provide static content, others might be updated on a consistent basis. The system intelligently locates new content and populates the discovery database with it.
2. Organizations usually compile their own private research and document corpuses. The Discovery service can connect to any local or popular pre-existing storage service (such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, S3 etc) and ingest selected folders.
3. Existing connectors to social media sites utilize user defined search patterns to filter and locate public opinion messages of interest. These messages can be analyzed with additional tools to glean useful information.
Additional supported sources include RSS feeds, zipped document archives and email accounts. In addition, the system provides the capability to link with external API based services for specialized information retrieval.