Xerox has developed and released an innovation that is set to take search engine indexing capabilities to the next level.
It is a semantic networking tool that integrates into Xerox's FactSpotter legal document search system. It is being described as the next stage in textual indexing development, and is the culmination of a four-year project at Xerox's European research centre in France.
Semantic networking aims to make legal fact-finding easier. When companies or people come under investigation, years are spent poring through documents, e-mails, brochures and other forms of information in search of evidence.
A semantic networking tool would expedite that process significantly. Rather than searching for patterns of characters, it understands the contexts in which terms relate to one another and can locate relevant information based on words or even discussions and discourses that appear to mean the same thing as the subject of a user's query.
"The advanced search engine goes beyond a typical keyword search or current data mining programs," says Rob Abraham, MD of Xerox's exclusive local distributor, Bytes Document Solutions, "which typically end up searching only 40% of all the documents that are relevant because the keywords are too limiting".
Xerox's search tool is more accurate because it delves into documents, extracting the concepts and the relationships among them. By understanding the context, it returns the right information to the searcher and it even highlights the exact location of the answer in the document.
Xerox has been involved in semantic networking theory and research for many years, but has only recently gone public with its findings.
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