About

About Mensa

Project History

For a number of years, beginning within Quest Software and continuing within Dell Software (after a company acquisition), the core Mensa contributors a have been working on platform technologies for discovering, mapping, and connecting otherwise disconnected data across various enterprise information sources. One key ingredient in such solutions is the ability to accurately and efficiently find stuff.

Most recently, we have focused on delivering automatic digital asset classification technologies, such as those used by Dell One Identity Manager Data Governance Edition - Classification Module.

We had been using licensed, third-party software for dictionary-based keyword searching, but for a variety of reasons, we knew that component would eventually need to be replaced. About a year ago, we began looking for open source alternatives. However, no available open source solution had all the elements we were looking for: generics, flexibility, fuzzy matching, large dictionary efficiency, etc.

So, in early 2014, one of us (Seidl) set out to create a new "Java Aho-Corasick Library" that would satisfy all of these requirements.

Why Mensa?

When we decided to release this project as open source, we thought it should have a short, easily remembered, and easily spelled name--"Java Aho-Corasick Library" was a mouthful! Our colleagues at Dell had recently released Doradus as open source. We decided to piggyback on their naming approach and chose an astronomical name.

Mensa is a small constellation in the southern sky. Its name is Latin for table. This project is a modest sized class library, primarily designed to search for sets--or tables--of keywords.