As corporate information grows exponentially, so too does the demand for sophisticated search solutions that offer a higher degree of accuracy through recall and precision.
A fast search technology does not improve productivity if users are forced to trawl through hundreds of search results, declares Piet Dempsey, managing director of information asset management solution provider Knowledge Focus.
"Providing every member of the organisation with instant access to every relevant piece of information promotes efficiency, allows faster and more accurate decision-making, and secures stronger collaborative working with a higher level of cross-company knowledge sharing."
"Search and categorisation go hand-in-hand in most organisations," he continues. "Even those that have only implemented one or the other technology will eventually be faced with integrating their search systems to their categorisation systems. While both technologies offer effective ways to navigate and locate valuable information within corporations, both have limitations as well as advantages. Consequently, a combined system is the only truly effective way of providing a complete solution.
"For example, search does not require heavy data manipulation to be performed on information before the searcher can interact with it, but the searcher does need to know how to express what they are looking for. Categorisation, however, merely requires the searcher to `point and click` at what they are interested in, with repeated clicks to refine the dataset closer and closer to what they want. Unless the categories have been set up in an efficient way, however the searcher won`t be able to navigate to the correct location correctly.
"Taxonomy has proven to be a highly efficient structure for organising structured and unstructured content and is a critical component of any sizeable information management structure, be it a content management system, intranet or portal. It enables companies to browse, search, provide content management and personalisation to the user based on predefined criteria, measurement and metrics analysis."
Dempsey says a taxonomical structure should ideally be invisible to the end-user. "Users should take for granted that they have reliable comprehensive access to all the data they need and should be empowered to connect that data so as to identify previously non-recognised relationships and build their own unique webs of related data that may be disconnected in time, geography and even domain."
Knowledge Focus offers RetrievalWare from Convera, an advanced categorisation and retrieval solution for organisations that have large amounts of information they need to make searchable. RetrievalWare can index, organise and securely retrieve contents from a wide range of repositories and document types, including file systems, groupware systems, Web pages, XML, relational databases, leading document management systems and even video and scanned paper documents. All of this information can be browsed and searched simultaneously from any Internet-enabled computer running either Internet Explorer or Netscape. RetrievalWare allows users to use simple natural language queries as a basis for categorisation and retrieval without concern for search syntax, word usage and other details for content in over 25 languages.
"The categorisation technology incorporated in RetrievalWare leverages established semantic models that mirror the way people associate different words and concepts," says Dempsey. "Authors may well understand a particular subject but often lack `the big picture` when it comes to how a particular piece of information relates to other topics. Thus information organised by a given taxonomy reflects how people think about the ideas embodied in related documents. The result is that user expectations are met as they navigate a taxonomy, browsing their way towards the information they need, ultimately finding the information where they would expect to find it.
"The combination of advanced search, categorisation and cataloguing tools are the way forward to offer end-users the possibility to focus straight in on the information they need," he concludes.
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Established in August 2000, Pretoria-based Knowledge Focus specialises in digital asset management and markets a range of products to help customers manage their information assets. The company supports and serves organisations that need to retrieve information quickly and accurately, and focuses specifically on the retrieval and preservation sectors. Knowledge Focus has extensive experience in the competitive intelligence and strategic marketing intelligence markets, and is a master reseller for a number of exciting technologies that enable these business functionalities.
These include media asset management (MAM) solutions for the broadcast and entertainment industry, as well as RetrievalWare from US-based company Convera.
RetrievalWare is a knowledge discovery platform that combines proven enterprise search and categorisation capabilities with dynamic classification methodology to help organisations automate knowledge management and discovery processes. The solution maximises return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages.
Knowledge Focus` clients include Eskom, Technikon SA, Gensec, Kumba Resources, Government, M-Net and NEMISA.
Visit: www.kfocus.co.za
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