RiverGlass is a software company that makes data analysis

Data analysis

Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making...

 applications currently used by customers in several fields.

Companies use RiverGlass Recon to find, collect, and analyze text information from the web and internal document repositories using text analytics

Text analytics

The term text analytics describes a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation. The term is roughly synonymous with text mining;...

. A variety of techniques are used to perform this analysis, e.g., semantic technology

Semantic technology

In software, semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code.This enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason with them at execution time...

, domain ontologies

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

, natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

, document summarization, information extraction

Information extraction

Information extraction is a type of information retrieval whose goal is to automatically extract structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents. In most of the cases this activity concerns processing human language texts by means of natural language...

, text classification, and clustering for relevance feedback

Relevance feedback

Relevance feedback is a feature of some information retrieval systems. The idea behind relevance feedback is to take the results that are initially returned from a given query and to use information about whether or not those results are relevant to perform a new query...

.

U.S. law enforcement agencies use RiverGlass Recon to analyze text on the web, and use RiverGlass Detect to pull together information from multiple internal and external databases using a form of federated query. RiverGlass Detect also uses a variety of text and data analytics such as link analysis

Link Analysis

In network theory, link analysis is a data-analysis technique used to evaluate relationships between nodes. Relationships may be identified among various types of nodes , including organizations, people and transactions...

 and machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

 to bring together information from both structured data and unstructured data

Unstructured data

Unstructured Data refers to information that either does not have a pre-defined data model and/or does not fit well into relational tables. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well...

 sources. These agencies use the programs in drug prohibition enforcement efforts, as well as the combating of violent crime

Violent crime

A violent crime or crime of violence is a crime in which the offender uses or threatens to use violent force upon the victim. This entails both crimes in which the violent act is the objective, such as murder, as well as crimes in which violence is the means to an end, such as robbery. Violent...

 and terrorism

Terrorism

Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...

. These programs are not used to monitor internet communications, only to gather information from the web and from internal databases. http://www.illinois.gov/PressReleases/ShowPressRelease.cfm?SubjectID=3&RecNum=5368 http://www.riverglassinc.com/

The company was based on some technologies developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...

 and has received venture capital from IllinoisVENTURES.