Corporations usually have a lot of unstructured data in different formats stored in different places. The problem consists in getting centralized access to all these data and providing different levels of user access to them.
Each corporation is unique as it uses its own IT infrastructure. That is why a framework is a better solution to the problem than a ready-made solution that does not always meet the corporate needs.
SMILA was an Eclipse Foundation initiative to solve the problem. We took a significant part in this project along with our partner Brox IT Solutions Gmbh.
SMILA had an open architecture allowing developers to connect different data sources accessors and different data format extractors. Software products based on SMILA gather and extract data from the whole corporate network, index them, and store the indexes in one centralized place. They also provide various tools for accessing the indexed data – from UI to API.