Discere Dev Update

Discere is approaching a usable alpha release. I just need to add support for zip/jar/tar/etc archives, and incorporate my prior PST handler from black friar, then add rudimentary document tagging. Spreadsheets are still a bane – I don’t know what the point is really, they never come out in a readable format without human intervention; I’m wondering about rendering them from an HTML table extraction.
I thought I would just post the above dev log update since I have so little time to blog right now. As a quick explanation, Discere is a part of my dissertation work, and is a subset of my Blackfriar project. Discere is intended to be an eDiscovery / Document review system with robust index/search capabilities, while Black Friar is the overarching project linking digital forensic acquisition / preservation data into a reviewable / produce-able format. All of it relies on a substantial number of Open Source projects to leverage existing, robust projects into a tool usable by anyone. It is also cross-platform to address the increasing number of Mac and Linux systems found in the legal environment (trust me, half of my law school classmates are on macs right now, and I am noticing an increase in usage with clients I do expert work for).