* DSView offers a range of features including 'fuzzy matching' properties
Last issue I said, “Directories don’t get headline billing here much anymore.” I should have known I would soon be corrected, as just a day or two later I had a trio of bright-eyed Aussies on the phone who wanted to talk about — directories.
Andrew Ferguson (vice president of group marketing), Andrew Sciberras (identity and access management business manager) and Steven Legg (chief scientist) from Melbourne’s eB2Bcom were exited (and maybe over-caffeinated, it was very early in the a.m. in Melbourne) to fill me in on their latest iteration of the directory management application called ViewDS.
EB2Bcom has been around for about 15 years, but their directory, View500, began more than 20 years ago since its inception at Australia’s Telstra Research Laboratory (analogous to the U.S.’s Bell Labs or Xerox PARC) by a team that included Legg. He just may have the longest association with a single directory product of any person I know.
Over the years View500, begun as an implementation of the x.500 standard, has acquired all of the attributes of LDAP but eB2Bcom has gone beyond that to the XML Enabled Directory (XED), a standard they helped develop.
ViewDS is the stand-alone directory and data management agent the company originally developed for View500 but which is now available for any LDAP-enabled data store (such as Active Directory, eDirectory, Sun’s Java System directory, Oracle Internet Directory, IBM Directory Server, as well as those from CA, Siemans, OpenLDAP and more).
I spent almost two hours watching ViewDS go through it’s paces. I can’t hope to tell you everything here in a few hundred words, so I’ll highlight a few things and suggest you check it out for yourself.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature — really a set of features — are the “fuzzy matching” properties:
* Phonetic matching — For English (e.g. “pane” will match “payne”) or Mandarin (using the Pinyin romanization).
* Typing correction — Compensates for missing and transposed characters.
* Stem matching — e.g. “optics” will match “optical”.
* Synonym matching — e.g. “Bob ” will match ” Robert “, ” road” will match “street”, “HS” will match “High School”, and vice versa. Administrators can add their own synonyms at runtime and they can be configured separately for each attribute type.
* Abbreviation matching — e.g. “NSW” will match “New South Wales” and vice versa.
* Word matching — including word synonyms, word phonetic matching and word typing correction. The approximate matching strategies can be configured to operate on words within values as well as whole values.
Add to that the ability to instantly move or rename non-leaf entries in the directory tree while maintaining all links with enforced referential integrity.
Then there’s XED, an extension of LDAP and X.500 directories that builds native support for XML into the directory making it a general-purpose XML database (and accessible with your XML tools).
I could go on and on, but there’s so much more — check it for yourself.
