Does Dial Idol Really Work?

How well does Autonomy IDOL server work in sanitizing product data from multiple sources?

• We take a lot of product data from customers that comes in a lot of very messy formats and put it online. Has anyone used Autonomy IDOL for this, and if so, how was your experience?

• Answer:

  It's possible to do data cleansing in the connectors, and to some degree cleansing usually has to happen at the connector level during any IDOL project. If you have a lot of data that needs to be cleaned / standardized, Autonomy connectors may not be the best way to do it. IDOL focuses on making the content searchable when a user enters a query. It's schema-less...it can accept nearly any format and make it searchable, but it's strength isn't trying to standardize that data. I would say if this is your primary goal, there are probably other software applications geared to that purpose.