Convera Corporation (NASDAQ:CNVR) announced the addition of four partners to its Open Excalibur partner program. The Open Excalibur search platform provides integration of the 3rd party products and services by adhering to standards such as REST and XML. In addition, Convera is working with partners on an indexing API to allow 3rd party technologies such as language processing, entity extractors, and geo-tagging to fit directly into the indexing pipeline. The Open Excalibur platform will allow customers to incorporate other technologies to customize the Excalibur search and analysis capabilities to their specific needs. Convera and Factiva plan to develop a universal data box utilizing a platform built on Excalibur and representing a large, deep index of categorized and authority-ranked Web results. The companies also plan to create an open source consortium to help them target vertical markets such as government and law enforcement organizations and to launch a secure hosted data center to provide secure subscription service access to open source content. FMS Advanced Systems Group of Vienna, Va., is porting their Sentinel Threat Management System (TMS) link analysis suite so it can work directly with Excalibur to enable analysts and researchers to use the Internet more extensively. Sentinel TMS represents the way for visualizing, analyzing and managing complex data, including 2D and 3D models, Social Network Analysis and secure collaboration for workgroups. http://www.convera.com