Background:
Illation is a Singapore-based company providing sophisticated software solutions for Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Case-based Reasoning (CBR). Their software allows organisations to codify their existing base of knowledge in a system that can be easily accessed by others, thus improving customer support initiatives and reducing the time needed to train new staff.
Not only do their systems support various methods of querying (including natural language queries either typed in or spoken), but their rules engine can be integrated into other software to provide automatic decision-making abilities.
The Problem:
Having worked extensively within the mortgage industry, particularly within the US and Australia, Illation identified an opportunity to combine their Case-based Reasoning tools with a state of the art user interface to provide data capture and management systems for mortgage originators and brokers. This would integrate with the CBR engine to provide options to the user as to which mortgages they may qualify for based on the data they have entered and the rules of the mortgage provider. Ultimately this would reduce the processing time for each application by improving the quality of the data captured and providing guidance to the user at an early stage as to their eligibility.
The Solution:
In order to differentiate their solution, Illation elected to move beyond a traditional linear web interface and develop a Rich Internet Application. This is a loose term to describe a browser-based interface that more closely provides a user experience similar to a traditional desktop application. Key elements include:
- dynamic navigation between different parts of the application without waiting for pages to reload
- dynamic validation providing instant user feedback as to which fields need to be filled in
- web service interface to provide save and load facility for a user's application as well as allowing them to resume at a later stage. By transmitting only the data rather than any presentation information, the response time is dramatically increased
Technical Details:
The client application was developed using the OpenLaszlo development framework. OpenLaszlo is an XML-based development environment for creating cross-platform, cross-browser rich internet application. Applications are created using a combination of an XML dialect to quickly define the elements of the user interface and JavaScript to tie together all the dynamic functionality required. These are then compiled into a standard Macromedia Flash movie which can be viewed in any browser. There are numerous inbuilt functions to deal with XML and make and receive web-service requests.
The OpenLaszlo technology is highly intuitive and a functional application can be built extremely quickly.
Summary:
By combining our strong design and user-interface development skills with Illation's highly regarded software products we have produced a new application that is already garnering interest around the globe. We are currently working on more of the back-end components to allow the brokers to manage their loan portfolio.
