In a world of 24 hour news, it’s almost inevitable that something happens while you’re asleep that is going to affect your next workday. That’s true whether you’re a journalist covering international terrorism or a corporate brand manager protecting the reputation of your company and its products. The problem is how you quickly and efficiently figure out what happened that really is relevant to you, so that you can act on that information.

The latest version of Expert System’s semantic platform COGITO Focus, released today, aims to further streamline that search and analysis process.

The software in its original incarnation could support nearly 65 different internal and external data formats, convert them for consumption by its semantic engine, and disambiguate, discover connective logic within and categorize text for its search-enabling semantic index. The solution aimed to provide semantic precision over traditional keyword-based index search, and to let users continually recall that to discover alternative and affiliated versions of their search concept that they perhaps had not been aware of.

The new release adds three new notches to the belt of the tool for searching, discovering, classifying and interpreting text information – features it says will make it faster to find what you need to know and more accurately analyze it. Heading these up are semantic intelligent agents for capturing, integrating and semantically indexing new structured and unstructured information, both from internal data updates on corporate database servers and from the web through social media, blogs, forums, pages, RSS feeds and so on. “But now we also default to run through the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) classification scheme,” says Expert System USA CEO Brooke Aker. IPTC is used for the business-to-business exchange of news among news agencies, other news providers and news publishers; for example, through the standard’s use, news outlets sourcing information from other outlets, such as wire services, have access to the classifications to know to flow an article about a basketball event to the sports section rather than the national news section.

“We’ve adapted our semantic network to include their ontology of categories,” Aker says. The agents give COGITO Focus a way to find and ingest a wider range of news, categorize it according to a news standard, and put users in a position to look at their inbound news from an immediate IPTC classification standpoint through its intelligent search interface. This should represent a very fast way for users to drive down to a small set of what matters to them. “So I’m not looking at headlines or snippets but at actual categories that all the news feeds fit into, so it’s prompting me not to dream up a search but showing me categorically what 24 hours worth of news fits into in this standard classification,” and its sub-categories.

That’s coupled with the notion of faceted search. At the end of each search, Focus does the backend work to automatically present concepts, entities and so on so that users know how to modify their parameters to get the content they need, Expert says. You can start with 500 seemingly relevant articles, get them down to 20 through the use of agents, and with faceted search narrow to individual entities or other features classified within documents. “Is the system smart enough for me to look at people only? Yes. Now is it smart enough to look at people only in government, not business? Yes. So you can click those as a form of faceted search to narrow the articles you have to review,” Aker says.

Finally, the latest version extends the software’s ability to illustrate semantic relations between concepts and entities with graphical representations. It lets users visualize across documents the connections among the people they’re searching on, the organizations they’re affiliated with and how they are geographically arrayed, and so on. “There are a lot of different ways to visualize not just a single document but now this smaller group of documents, because now your task is not to find but analyze things. And you really want to analyze not one document at a time but all documents, to connect the dots between 5 or 10 different articles,” Aker says. That gets to the core notion of the semantic web—that everything is connected to everything else.

And it builds upon that with connections to background information about the entities that manifest in searches. Pulling from sources such as Wikipedia, Google images, and 123 People, “behind the scenes with intelligent agents and our connective tissue to the web, we can pull back some more background information on a person,” he says. If, for instance, as a marketing person you learn some obscure official in a Scandinavian country has issues a recall of your company’s product, now you can find out some more details about who this person is and how you can reach out to him.

Existing customers of Focus are eligible for a free upgrade to the new version.