Attivio and Traction Software Help Power Borlaug Global Rust Initiative to a 2011 Computerworld Honors Program Nomination

NEWTON, Mass., May 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Attivio, Inc. today announced that IDG's Computerworld Honors Program has acknowledged its work with the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) and Traction Software to create a community portal developed to help fight the spread of wheat rust.  As part of the award program, the BGRI has been named as a 2011 Laureate. The annual award program honors visionary applications of information technology promoting positive social, economic and educational change.

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"The number and quality of nominations this year were very inspiring and demonstrate how valuable IT is to community change," said John Amato, Publisher, Computerworld.  "Computerworld is very proud to name the 2011 class of Laureates and showcase their initiatives benefiting society through innovative uses of IT."

A new strain of wheat rust, Ug99, has emerged that could potentially be responsible for the destruction of more than a third of worldwide wheat production.  The BGRI needed a way to bring experts, as well as a dispersed community of wheat scientists, universities and agricultural research organizations in more than 40 countries, together to collaborate, educate a broader community and disseminate details on wheat rust research and best practices to prevent its spread.

The BGRI project organizers, led by Cornell University, selected Traction Software's TeamPage, a social software solution that combines wiki, blog, tagging, activity streams, discussion and social networking capabilities in a secure, scalable Enterprise 2.0 social software platform, as a basis for the portal.  Additionally, Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), was chosen to power search and information access, which are considered to be vital functions for the website.  

"The mission of the BGRI website is to make information available and usable to our international audience.  Attivio has greatly helped in these efforts because content that was once hard to find and buried within the site is now easily accessible," said John Bakum, BGRI Web Administrator.

AIE is a unified information access platform that aggregates content in all forms -- structured, unstructured and semi-structured.  The Attivio Module and underlying platform gives researchers and other wheat rust community stakeholders easy access to relevance ranked search, guided by advanced entity extraction as well as further drill down based on explicit facets including tags on the content and implicit facets, such as derived key words and phrases, that occur prominently in the content. With increasing content, the relevance engine in Attivio's AIE improves results and user efficiency.

"At Attivio we are proud to provide technology that enables researchers and scientists from all over the world to collaborate and analyze data that will help end this pandemic," said Ali Riaz, CEO, Attivio.  "AIE provides unparalleled capabilities to allow the BGRI to continue to make advancements in the fight against this disease and we are humbled that our solutions support them in this important undertaking."  

The Computerworld Honors awards will be presented at the Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards on June 20, 2011 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.  

About Computerworld Honors Program

Founded by International Data Group (IDG) in 1988, The Computerworld Honors Program is governed by the not-for-profit Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation. Computerworld Honors is the longest running global program to honor individuals and organizations that use information technology to promote positive social, economic and educational change. Additional information about the program and a Global Archive of past Laureate case studies and oral histories of Leadership Award recipients can be found at the Computerworld Honors website (http://events.computerworld.com/Honors2011).

About the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (www.globalrust.org) is an international advocacy and coordination platform created to reduce the world's vulnerability to wheat stem rust, a disease that threatens wheat crops worldwide, and to facilitate enhancements in wheat productivity.

About Attivio

On-demand insight is critical to the success of every enterprise, but the information that decisions and processes depend on is created and stored in many formats -- databases, spreadsheets, SharePoint, documents, emails, blogs and more. Attivio solves this long-standing problem of information isolation by integrating search, business intelligence, data warehousing and process automation capabilities to provide answers and intelligence -- not just data. With Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE), users retrieve and analyze all types of content and data with simple, search-style queries and via reports and executive dashboards.

AIE's dynamic approach to unified information access (UIA) features rapid development, true incremental scalability, information-driven workflow, text analytics, native SQL, real-time updates and permissioning and a small footprint that can be easily embedded in other products and applications. Business and IT leaders, system integrators and independent software vendors partner with Attivio to address today's global business imperatives -- uncovering insights that drive innovation and reveal new opportunities, mitigating risk and controlling cost.  Please visit www.attivio.com.

Contact:
Emily Held
PAN Communications
978-474-1900
[email protected]

SOURCE Attivio, Inc.