I looked up one of my old companies, Pandesic, and found out that someone named "Transaction Server" worked there. Transaction Server's been busy, too. She's worked not only at Pandesic, but at Broadvision, HTML, Java, and CGI as well. How do I know Transaction Server's a woman? Corproate Alumni lists her as Ms Transaction Server.

They use some kind of entity extraction technology which extracts various entities based on certain grammatical patterns and co-occurance. So Mickey Butts becomes a google co-founder (http://networking.eliyon.com/AlumniDirectory/PersonDetailLimited.asp?Per...) because he has written an article about Larry Page and transaction server becomes a person.

None of the known entity extraction algorithms are perfect. If you want to be sure that you are right you would not have a complete record and if you have a complete record that would not be correct.

I am more curious about how they allow people to edit their records and counter spam while doing that. But all said and done this is an interesting experiment.

The technology at work on the Eliyon site doesn't appear to be anything really earth-shattering. They seem to be using a web crawler primarily pointed at sources of press releases and articles. They also seem to be mining "about us" pages on corporate web sites.

It's also possible that they're utilizing the "Wayback Machine" database (http://www.archive.org/) to build an associated history based on what they find using their web crawler.

David H. Deans
http://daviddeans.webhop.net

that's the way it has to be i guess - oh well

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