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IN-SPIRE™ Visual Document Analysis

FAQ: Why was IN-SPIRE™ developed?

By the mid 1990s, the information age was burying information analysts in data. Analysts had access to more data than ever before, but lacked the tools to process and assimilate the overwhelming volume and diversity of the information. Most of the information was in textual form, but in different styles, for various purposes that could not be reliably processed for information content.

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory began to explore whether a computer program could be developed to quickly and automatically convey the thematic content of large sets of unformatted text documents. The goal was to provide technology that enables analysts to spend quality time doing real information exploration by shifting workload from processing data to analysis.

The initial research project was the basis for Information Visualization program area. The SPIRE (Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration) application was one of its first software products, for the Unix platform. IN-SPIRE is for personal computers running the Windows operating system.

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IN-SPIRE™