As the business world transforms to an information economy, Enterprises have extended legacy business systems to Intranets, Extranets and the Internet to expand customer reach and increase market capitalization.

To accomplish this "web-ification" of their Enterprise, they have built their own information gateways or portals and the bridges linking them to other information sources. This investment in new technology offers added benefits that are just now being realized.

Seeking information is costly as a business operation. Although the collection and distribution of common business information is likely to be well maintained and optimized for use, some of the information that was gathered with great monetary and time investment may often be discarded. This discarded "overflow" of information can reside on a department Web server, in a document database.

Here are some examples of where the disconnect of information can and does happen:

Example #1: When companies have multiple campuses or corporations, with each unit often managing its own information. Information becomes distant and disparate causing duplication of information, and sometimes making it unavailable for use and/or collaboration.

Example #2: When multiple vendors or information resources need to be queried and each requires visiting their access point and search location to perform individual queries with dissimilar interfaces, the query will yield results in many different formats across numerous pages.

Example #3: The over 300,000 specialty databases - Government, Corporate, University, Trade associations, Message boards, and Chat rooms - bury hard-to-find deep content throughout the Web.

FirstStop WebSearchT, LLC would like to propose an elegant, non-intrusive, low cost solution. Our suggestion is to connect indexed collections of information to a common interface on the employees' desktops and empower them to manage and filter the continuous growth of "other" information in real-time. Employees will have access to a more powerful and personalized desktop and the ability to conduct complete, cross-collection searches within a common interface. They will receive a quick-look result set, which they can quickly filter and reuse.

The unique benefits of our offering include:

• Simplicity and low cost of implementation with the potential of significant ROI.
• Proven high-performance core technology.
• Highly scalable and adaptive interface based on open standards.
• Solid core strategy which offers a foundation from which to build.

'FirstStop WebSearch(tm)'s search source integration components are an XML framework solution that provides a highly connective, decentralized, and distributed search infrastructure which addresses the scale and heterogeneity of documents across the Inter-, Intra-, or Extra-Net.

Our components enable search services to interoperate across domains by providing user-configurable tools for mapping between metadata schemas, performing search queries against multiple data sources, and performing query pre- and post-processing. Access to our search services is through a platform-neutral standard and emerging-standard tools.

We offer a proven Web-Centric Information Seeking and Retrieval Technology for the Inter-, Intra, or Extra-Net. Our product is ideally suited for:

• Ad Hoc & Time-Critical Information Sharing
• Collaborative Projects
• More efficient information browsing
• Information Distribution

The Need: Integrate real-time and static data; inexpensive information sharing.

The Challenge: Data formats are complex; queries are elaborate; metadata schemas are extremely domain specific.

The Benefits: Real-time information sharing; greater efficiency and reduced costs; uniform query method to disparate information; XML-provided data transparency and unification across disparate systems and applications.

The Approach: Use existing information sources more efficiently; eliminate redundant information; leverage new information sources; avoid adding another proprietary layer; capitalize on the power of highly managed data.

Information Integration: Scalable, fault-tolerant connectors for various information source platforms; access to disparate sources as if single source.

Technology: Open XML connector specification; tool for remote updates; visual interface to collect and aggregate data; low cost Web technology; open interface specification to allow our utility (FSWS) to connect the Internet's vast network of search engines. Note: FSWS's open specification is useful for any system designer seeking a standard and inter-operable XML definition for processing search data. The specification includes comprehensive elements contained in most search sources. As developers identify new data needs, the FirstStop search specification may be extended to support additional data elements and industry segments.

Contact:
John Brush, Vice President
FirstStop Web Search, LLC
805-712-1510
735 Tank Farm Road, Suite 250
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
http://www.FirstStopWebSearch.com