The Alpaca Platform

Web Crawlers

The ALPACA platform consists of web spiders that mine the entire Internet looking for topics of conversation. We go deep into the Internet to look for data that even the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) do not and cannot return.  This is important because influence can start anywhere and we need to be sure we have found even the smallest pockets of conversations.

Screening

Unfortunately, the Internet is cluttered with junk, spam, link farms, and other undesirable, unwanted and not-on-topic content.  Our goal is to deliver the cleanest and most valuable data.  Our process consists of our screeners previewing sites to ensure their validity and automated removal of known spam and other undesirable sites.  We only need to do this once on our first run for any topic but the result is an unparalleled foundation for all work going forward for that topic – clean content devoid of spam with the comprehensive inclusion of all valid sites across the Internet.

Natural Language Processing

After screening, we employ our natural language processors. Our NLP is also unique as is it trainable and over even a short period time will learn how to put complex and industry-specific text into proper context for each topic.  We employ our screening process, again only once per topic, this time to look at a small subset of content to determine their sentiment and relevance to create our training set.  The training set is then used to organize the rest of the content, which could be tens of millions of data points.

Search Engine

Our internal search engine allows users to search through all of the content we have retained - with any keyword and as many times as they want.  We also turn topics into keywords as it breaks conversations apart into individual keywords and weighs each by usage and sentiment.

Sentiment Analysis

Our automated sentiment analysis component of the NLP uses its algorithms combined with the screening work to mark all of the conversations we have found for a topic.  Our default sentiment continuum is positive, negative, and neutral.  That is customizable for clients and can be such ranges as delight through horror, satisfied to unsatisfied, and many others.  Our analysis identifies emotions as well such as sarcasm and anger.

Geo-location

We associate all content by its readership with its geo-location by its designated market area and plot this information on a physical, point-and-click map. The map can be viewed globally, nationally and regionally and can drill down to individual conversations and their sentiment.

Knowledge Assessment

Our NLP can assess sentiment and sentence construct to identify the knowledge level of the writers of content or conversations and can characterize that knowledge as high, medium, or low. This allows us to identify key influential posters by their readership as well as level of knowledge.

Content Publishing

All of the information processed and analyzed by the ALPACA platform can be published three ways:

	Within one of Wool.labs’ Products
	Within one of our vertical solutions or custom built applications
	Through our shared services that can be used by 3rd party developers or applications