Frisk has launched Document Fetcher as a new feature of its software platform.

The company says this new tool will help make the process of fulfilling Freedom of Information (FOI) requests faster and more cost-effective.

According to the company, there has been a 419% increase in FOI complaints since 2018 and a 51% increase in request refusal - denying citizens access to information under an act that was designed to ensure government transparency. 

Document Fetcher is said to help prevent this issue by tackling it at the source.

Frisk CEO Nick Kervin says that one of the most significant pain points in managing any FOI request is managing the vast array of data types and sources that need to be accessed and aggregated to fulfil the request.

"The variety of information that someone can request is wide," he says.

"Documents, emails, notes, recordings, chats, calendar invites, social media posts, images, videos... the list goes on. Often these are held in a variety of different storage and communication platforms, many with unique formats and access requirements."

Kervin highlights that requests often involve many individuals searching for, collating, and supplying documents from various platforms to the manager of the request, who then must further collate, sometimes redact individual documents, and then fulfil the request. 

"Not only can this lead to requests being responded to outside of statutory timelines, it follows that the longer a request takes, the more it costs."

Document Fetcher can assist in a variety of Government, public and private situations, and the technology fast-tracks FOI fulfilment via a powerful combination of data indexing, artificial intelligence and natural linguistic programming.

Users can integrate and simultaneously search data across tools such as (Micro Focus) Content Manager, Microsoft Sharepoint (and extensions), Objective and more. If an FOI request spans more than one topic or keyword, the technology can create a collection of search results from all related queries.

It can also accurately and efficiently search all data types, including structured (document and record management systems, CRM etc), semi-structured (word docs, emails, calendar invites etc) and unstructured (PDFs, design files, video or audio files etc) data types.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) also ensures that all text, even if it's image-based, is searchable, and all located documents and files can be exported into a ZIP file in a single click.

Frisk was launched in 2008 and, according to the company, was founded to help businesses solve their disparate data problems.