Look back here soon for videos on this and other exciting new features in Starlight!

We continue to incorporate valuable user feedback and have made a number of key developments to our software platform in version 4.1.4. Our intense focus on the user experience is at the heart of Future Point Systems’ corporate values of responsiveness, top-notch technical support, ease of adoption, technical innovation, and rapid, client-driven product development. It’s valuable user feedback that continues to drive the development of the Starlight platform.

The latest enhancements to the Starlight product suite include:

Starlight VIS and Starlight VIS Lite Edition (LE) 4.1.4

• Improved Out-of-the-Box Usability – To help novice users analyze their data as quickly as possible in Starlight, we’ve added a New Project Wizard that steps users through the initial tasks of setting up a new project. As the user becomes more familiar with the Starlight application, this wizard can be hidden away and recalled later if desired. In addition, the Home tab of the ribbon has been redesigned to enable users to more quickly find the most frequently used tools within Starlight. New context-sensitive tabs open based on what users are currently viewing, but in most cases only the Home tab buttons will be needed to perform analysis tasks.

• Advanced Performance & Data Format Support – We have incorporated a new, advanced indexing scheme that covers all data in each Starlight project. For users with large datasets, this results in a massive productivity improvement since indexing was often the single greatest time consumer when diving into their data. In addition, we’ve added support for importing Microsoft Outlook PST files and ZIP archives directly into Starlight VIS. Users can simply drag a PST file onto VIS and VIS will extract all the e-mails as well as attachments, which will be imported separately (such as text or spreadsheet files). Importing a ZIP file is now as easy as importing a directory – all the files inside the archive will be imported into VIS automatically.

• Expanded Knowledge Manager Functionality – The Knowledge Manager, first introduced in version 4.1.1, has received a major new feature: the Grid. New grid tabs can be added alongside the traditional graphical tabs in the Knowledge Manager to help work with larger sets of data. Many of the same Social Network Analysis (SNA) and network tools available to graphical views are also available in the grid view, enabling detailed analysis with larger sets of data. In addition, based on user demand, we have added color encoding for Knowledge Manager Nodes.

• Enhanced User Experience – In this most recent Starlight release, we have focused on incorporating a number of valuable new features to enhance the overall user experience and enable users to realize greater value from their Starlight investment. For example, we have developed temporal and numeric filter animation, which allows users to easily see changes in their project data across slices of time or numeric ranges. Also, we have added an “Export with White Background” option when saving view screenshots to more easily print analytic insights from Starlight. Finally, we incorporated many other user-driven feature requests into this latest release, requests that we welcome and rely upon to continually improve the Starlight software platform.

Starlight Data Engineer (SDE)

In our previous release, we announced Starlight Data Engineer, which has received a tremendous positive response from our user base. Starlight Data Engineer is a powerful tool for data processing and integration, for use with both Starlight VIS & VIS LE, and for use with outside data processing tasks.

In version 4.1.4., Starlight Data Engineer introduces a number of new and improved modules, including:

• Microsoft Outlook PST Reader for extracting e-mails and attachments. The PST file reader will convert e-mail contents to a standardized XML schema and extract attachments in their original format. A threshold can be set for maximum attachment size or the module can be used to extract only attachments without exporting any e-mails at all.
• Zip Archive Reader and Writer for reading and writing to Zip archives.
• Data Inspector for looking at data as it passes through your processor.
• Data Merger for looking up data in a spreadsheet and injecting it into your XML.
• RegEx Extractor now has an inline replacement mode for making complicated pattern-based substitutions to the text without marking it up with additional XML tags.

Starlight Licensing Improvements

• New System ID – We have incorporated a new method for uniquely identifying each system that will be much more effective for our users.
• License Transfer – For client installations using Roaming or Floating licenses, a new feature in the License Server administration interface allows users to move licenses between accounts to simplify site management tasks.

Starlight VIS 4.1.4, Starlight VIS LE, and Starlight Data Engineer (SDE) are now available for download from the forum.

For more information regarding the acquisition of new Starlight VIS, Starlight VIS LE, and Starlight Data Engineer licenses, in addition to questions regarding becoming current on maintenance, please contact us at sales@futurepointsystems.com.

If you have any technical questions regarding the new Starlight VIS 4.1.4 release, Starlight VIS LE, Starlight SDE, or our download instructions, please contact us at support@futurepointsystems.com.

Finally, for general information about Future Point Systems, please visit us at http://www.futurepointsystems.com/.

We’re very excited about the new Starlight release and we’re looking forward to receiving your feedback

-Justin

1) Future Point Systems Corporate Summary & Starlight Technology Overview
2) Starlight v4.1.3 (latest release) Introduction
3) Presentation by Karen Taylor of Noblis, detailing how FPS & Noblis teamed together with Starlight for the IEEE VAST Challenge

1. First, you need to import the unstructured text using the default pre-processor. This will let Starlight extract as much as it can with the built-in lists and algorithms.
2. Then, narrow down a set of documents based on a query or visualization.
3. Next, build a valueset on some of the non-lex terms (usually these are people’s names). Clean the valueset up a little and split it up into several other valuesets based on the things found.
4. Now, export the valuesets to your My Documents\Starlight\lists directory so they’ll be used on the next import.
5. Finally, re-import the data into a clean project and the next import will extract the entities in these new lists into properties with the same name as the file you exported the valueset to.

Here’s a visual of these five steps:

1. Load the data into Starlight.
   
2. Narrow down the results based on your objective.
   
3. Make a valueset and clean it up.
   
4. Export the valueset to lists (I called it “EX_InterestingPeople.txt” here).
   
5. Re-import the data. Now the entities matching terms from the valueset will be in a new property and relationships will also be automatically identified.
   

Now you have some new entities tagged using the names you saved the valuesets to. You can add these to your semantic map and view them in the Knowledge Manager like this:

Let us know if you have any questions!

Stay tuned for a couple pictures (hopefully!) and the slide shows. If you missed the meeting, get in touch with us here or via blog@futurepointsystems.com.

Now, off to SINET.