Searching Blockchain with FreeEed

The Blockchain is composed of multiple blocks that can contain any information. However, it is not a database in a traditional sense: it is not fast, and it does not answer queries.

For example, the writing speed is one block every 10 minutes for Bitcoin and about one block every seven seconds for Ethereum. Queries, as such, do not exist at all: neither SQL nor NoSQL-type language is not provided.

Meanwhile, the information stored in Blockchain often needs to be searched. Here is a design pattern from CSIRO.

As of today, such a tool exists. FreeEed has been used by lawyers to do eDiscovery, legal reviewers, and researchers for all kinds of investigations. It allows you to give any data as input (see here) and indexes that data for searches. The data can be open Office files, PST mailboxes, a "load file" produced to lawyers due to an eDiscovery request, and Blockchain.

We are actively working on FreeEed all the time, adding input formats, processing capabilities, and machine learning. The tool is open source and welcomes new additions. The review part is called "FreeEed Review" and works through the browser.

The back end used to implement text search is Elasticsearch. This means that you can also look at the processed data through the mighty ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), which is also open source.

Happy searching!

FreeEed with Elasticsearch (7.7.2 release)

Improvements in this version (7.7.2):

• Elasticsearch integration. Now the users get more open source tools to work with FreeEed: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. 
• Bug fixes, code refactoring.
• Go here http://freeeed.org/

FreeEed 7.7.1 release

Here is what is new is FreeEed 7.7.1 release

• Restored deduplication
• Better email handling
• Separated processing engine code into its own project
• All UI forms done in IntelliJ, out of NetBeans and away from commercial editors

Enjoy!

Does FreeEed search for numbers? - Yes, it does!

This question was asked by one of the users, can he find numbers in the text that FreeEed indexes. I got curious myself and checked.

The reason that this is an important question is that I remember Craig Ball mentioning that in one of the requirements for good eDiscovery software. So OK, I ran a few searches and found out that out-of-the-box FreeEed does index all numbers. That felt good, and I am attaching the screenshots of the experiment.

Of course, that is not a special property of FreeEed but of Tika, Lucene, and SOLR. It's these components that are responsible for what FreeEed indexes.

Had this not been the case, I would tweak the use of the components, but luckily this was the way FreeEed already uses them. The advantage of passing through to these libraries is that the users can rely on the well-known Lucene syntax to do their searches.

Couchbase at Houston Hadoop & Spark Meetup

Justin Tuggle presented the well-justified reasons why today only NoSQL databases are up to par, to provide customer engagement and means for business survival, and of them, why Couchbase is to be preferred.

Here is the link to the materials.

An easy way to run FreeEed on Amazon

Running FreeEed on Amazon is very easy and offers some substantial benefits.

1. You can get a fully provisioned server in a minute
2. You can get any size of hard drive and a large number of CPU
3. It is as easy as using your desktop.

To start the server, find this AMI in the Oregon region on EC2: ami-e6acbf9f.

After you start the service, open the assigned IP in any browser. You will see a screen like the following below

Click on the 'vnc.html'. You will see the login screen

After you log in, you will see a full Ubuntu desktop, where you can do any work. FreeEed is already installed.

Enjoy!

eDisco and Open Source Software

Today I am starting a series of blog posts on how to do eDiscovery with open source software. I will base it initially on a wonderful book "Project Management in Electronic Discovery". The advice that I will give will not be limited to FreeEed, but it will draw on the complete range of Open Source, Data Science, etc.

Every eDiscovery person has her or his own set of tools, and I hope that these articles will add to your library. Let's organize those docs!

(Image source: Pexels.com)