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Category: Semantic technologies (Page 33 of 72)

Our coverage of semantic technologies goes back to the early 90s when search engines focused on searching structured data in databases were looking to provide support for searching unstructured or semi-structured data. This early Gilbane Report, Document Query Languages – Why is it so Hard to Ask a Simple Question?, analyses the challenge back then.

Semantic technology is a broad topic that includes all natural language processing, as well as the semantic web, linked data processing, and knowledge graphs.


Enterprise Whatever

As many of you know, we will be publishing a new report by Stephen Arnold in the next few weeks. The title, Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, begs the question of whether there is such a thing as “enterprise search”. The title of Lynda’s consulting practice blog “Enterprise Search Practice Blog”, begs the same question. In the case of content management, a similar question is begged by AIIM – “The Enterprise Content Management Association” (ECM) and the recent AIIM conference.

The debate about whether “enterprise fill-in-your-favorite-software-application” makes any sense at all is not new. The terms “Enterprise Document Management” (EDM) and “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP) were first used in the 80s, and, at least in the case of EDM, were just as controversial. We have Documentum to thank for both EDM and ECM. Documentum’s original mission was to be the Oracle of documents, so EDM probably seemed like an appropriate term to use. Quickly however, the term was appropriated by marketing pros from many vendors, as well as analysts looking for a new category of reports and research to sell, and conference organizers keeping current with the latest buzzwords (I don’t exclude us from this kind of activity!). It was also naively misused by many enterprise IT (as opposed to “personal IT” I suppose) professionals, and business managers who were excited by such a possibility.

ECM evolved when the competition between the established EDM vendors and the fast growing web content management vendors reached a point where both saw they couldn’t avoid each other (for market cap as well as user requirement reasons). Soon, any vendor with a product to manage any kind of information that existed outside of (or even sometimes even in) a relational database, was an “ECM” vendor. This was what led AIIM to adopt and try to define and lay claim to the term – it would cover all of the records management and scanner vendors who were their existing constituents, and allow them to appeal to the newer web content management vendors and practitioners as well.

We used to cover the question “Is there any such thing as ECM?” in our analyst panels at our conferences, and usually there would be some disagreement among the analysts participating, but our mainly enterprise IT audience largely became savvy enough to realize it was a non-issue.

Why is it a non-issue?

Mainly because the term has almost no useful meaning. Nobody puts all their enterprise content in a single ECM repository. It doesn’t even make sense to use the same vendors’ products across all departments even in small organizations. – that is why there is such a large variety of vendors with wildly different functionality at ECM events such as AIIM. The most that you can assume when you hear “ECM vendor” is that they probably support more than one type of content management application, and that they might scale to some degree.

There are many who think it not unreasonable to have a single “enterprise search” application for all enterprise content. If you are new to search technology this is understandable, since you may think simple word or phrase search should be able to work across repositories. But, of course, it is not at all that simple, and if you want to know why see Stephen’s blog or Lynda’s blog, among others. Both Steve and Lynda are uncomfortable with “enterprise search”. Steve prefers the term “behind the firewall search”. Lynda sticks with the term but with a slightly different definition, although I don’t think they disagree at all on how the term is misused and misinterpreted.

Why use “Enterprise … Whatever” terms at all?

There is only one reason, and that is that buyers and users of technology use these terms as a shortcut, sometimes naively, but also sometimes with full understanding. There is just no getting around the barrier of actual language use. Clearly, using the shortcut is only the first step in communicating – more dialog is required for meaningful understanding.

Enterprise Search Adopters

May-be it is this everlasting winter of weather events, but I’m ready for some big changes across the gray landscape. Experiencing endless winter has for me become a metaphor for what I observe within some enterprises as serial adoptions of search.

As I work on my forthcoming report, Enterprise Search Markets and Applications: Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, I am interviewing people who are deeply engaged in search technologies. They are presenting a view of search deployment and implementation that reinforces my own observations, complete with benefits and disappointments. However, search in enterprises is like recurring weather events, some big, some small but relentless in the repetitiveness of certain experiences. It seems that early adopters in the early stages of adoption often experience the euphoria of a fresh way to find stuff. Then inertia sets in as some large subset of adopters settles in to becoming routine but faithful users. The rest are like me with winter, looking for a really big change and more; the nitpicking begins as users cast their eyes to better options hyped by the media or by compatriots in other organizations with newer “bells and whistles.” Ah, what fickle beasts we are, as my husband will be very quick to remind me the first hot, humid day of summer when I complain in a desultory sulk.

So, I was delighted to read this article in the New York Times, Tech’s Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True, by Miguel Helft, on March 12. I particularly loved this comment from the article: “Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of change, said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a world in which only early adopters got to choose, we’d all be using CB radios and quadraphonic stereo.” It helps to put one’s quest for the next big thing into perspective.

It included another quote from David Gans who, from the community of the Well in which people communicate using text-only systems, “Just because you have a nuclear-powered thing that can dry your clothes in five minutes doesn’t mean there isn’t value to hanging your clothes in the backyard and talking to your neighbors while doing it.” As one who has never owned a clothes drier, this validated one of my own conscious decisions.

Seriously though, given all the comments collected from my interviews and my own experiences, it is really time to remind adopters, early and late, to give thought to appropriateness, what benefits us or adversely distracts us in the technologies we implement in our working worlds. (I’ll leave your personal technology use for you to sort out.) Taking time to think about your intentions and “what comes next” after getting that “must have” new search system is something only you can control. Nobody on the selling side of a bakery will ever remind you that you don’t really neeeed another cookie.

And in one more point, if you are in the market for search+, Steve Arnold does a fine job of positioning the appropriateness of each of the 24 systems he reviews in Beyond Search. It might just help you resist the superfluous and take a look some other options instead.

W3C Invites Implementations of XQuery Update Facility 1.0

The XML Query Working Group has published the Candidate Recommendation of “XQuery Update Facility 1.0.” This document defines an update facility that extends the “XML Query language, XQuery.” The XQuery Update Facility provides expressions that can be used to make persistent changes (including node insertion, deletion, modification, and creation) to instances of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model. The Working Group also published two additional documents that will become Working Group notes– ” XQuery Update Facility 1.0 Requirements” and “XQuery Update Facility 1.0 Use Cases.” http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/

SYSTRAN Launches Enterprise Server 6 Solution

SYSTRAN announced the release of SYSTRAN Enterprise Server 6, a solution that meets the full range of enterprise language translation needs. Enterprise Server 6 enables corporate users to understand multilingual information in real-time and to deliver consistent and validated translations enabling them to follow best business practices and communicate across different languages. Available in three editions targeted to the small and midsized businesses and enterprise platforms, Enterprise Server 6 addresses complex translation tasks and provides a workbench for managing translation projects. The solution automatically translates all types of documents and files ranging from manuals, procedures, reports, product and support information, content applications, websites, and all written texts. It translates most file types through a Web-based interface or a SYSTRAN Toolbar available on the user desktop. Corporations can integrate it into enterprise applications to drive multilingual information in and across channels, like the enterprise content management system, portal, search, website, etc. Common uses include adding an online translation service to the corporate intranet, on-demand website translation, localization for document workflows, integration with content management systems, databases, and other enterprise applications. SYSTRAN Enterprise Server 6, Workgroup Edition is designed for the small enterprise Intranet with up to 100 users. Price starts at $15,000. SYSTRAN Enterprise Server 6, Standard Edition is designed for the midsize Intranet or Extranet with up to 2,500 users using the Online Tools and Application Packs. Price starts at $30,000. SYSTRAN Enterprise Server 6, Global Edition is designed for enterprises with advanced translation requirements with unlimited user access. Price starts at $150,000. http://www.systransoft.com/

X1 Unveils New Enterprise Search Suite for Symantec Enterprise Vault

X1 Technologies, Inc., released a new enterprise search suite for Symantec Enterprise Vault. X1 Search Suite for Symantec Enterprise Vault provides an intuitive graphical interface to find, preview and act upon documents, email and attachments regardless of location. The X1 Search Suite for Symantec Enterprise Vault enhances customer productivity by providing the ability to search both the contents of the Vault and data residing in email applications and files. The X1 Search Suite for Symantec Enterprise Vault consists of three components. The first two consist of the scalable X1 Enterprise Server combined with the X1 Content Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault that provide true search federation and do not duplicate data. By using native API connectivity, the security of the user’s company security model is preserved and does not facilitate retention policy violations. Lastly, the X1 Suite includes the X1 Enterprise Search Client which provides a single search interface where users can search multiple vaults along with data in 3rd party email packages and in over 400 file formats. Users can then use the X1 client to preview and act upon the search results; including native Symantec Enterprise Vault actions. http://www.x1.com

Ontologies and Semantic Search

Recent studies describe the negative effect of media including video, television and on-line content on attention spans and even comprehension. One such study suggests that the piling on of content accrued from multiple sources throughout our work and leisure hours has saturated us to the point of making us information filterers more than information “comprehenders”. Hold that thought while I present a second one.

Last week’s blog entry reflected on intellectual property (IP) and knowledge assets and the value of taxonomies as aids to organizing and finding these valued resources. The idea of making search engines better or more precise in finding relevant content is edging into our enterprises through semantic technologies. These are search tools that are better at finding concepts, synonymous terms, and similar or related topics when we execute a search. You’ll find an in depth discussion of some of these in the forthcoming publication, Beyond Search by Steve Arnold. However, semantic search requires more sophisticated concept maps than taxonomy. It requires ontology, rich representations of a web of concepts complete with all types of term relationships.

My first comment about a trend toward just browsing and filtering content for relevance to our work, and the second one about the idea of assembling semantically relevant content for better search precision are two sides of a business problem that hundreds of entrepreneurs are grappling with, semantic technologies.

Two weeks ago, I helped to moderate a meeting on the subject, entitled Semantic Web – Ripe for Commercialization? While the assumed audience was to be a broad business group of VCs, financiers, legal and business management professionals, it turned out to have a lot of technology types. They had some pretty heavy questions and comments about how search engines handle inference and its methods for extracting meaning from content. Semantic search engines need to understand both the query and the target content to retrieve contextually relevant content.

Keynote speakers and some of the panelists introduced the concept of ontologies as being an essential backbone to semantic search. From that came a lot of discussion about how and where these ontologies originate, how and who vets them for authoritativeness, and how their development in under-funded subject areas will occur. There were no clear answers.

Here I want to give a quick definition for ontology. It is a concept map of terminology which, when richly populated, reflects all the possible semantic relationships that might be inferred from different ways that terms are assembled in human language. A subject specific ontology is more easily understood in a graphical representation. Ontologies also help to inform semantic search engines by contributing to an automated deconstruction of a query (making sense out of what the searcher wants to know) and automated deconstruction of the content to be indexed and searched. Good semantic search, therefore, depends on excellent ontologies.

To see a very simple example of an ontology related to “roadway”, check out this image. Keep in mind that before you aspire to implementing a semantic search engine in your enterprise, you want to be sure that there is a trusted ontology somewhere in the mix of tools to help the search engine retrieve results relevant to your unique audience.

Attensity Announces “VoC On-Demand” Software as a Service

Attensity announced Attensity VoC On-Demand, a new secure software as a service (SaaS) that enables users to access the company’s “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) solution via the Web for on-demand customer feedback analysis. Enterprises can now extract and analyze data about their customers in Attensity’s user interface and through customizable analytic dashboards. Attensity’s VoC solution uses the company’s Exhaustive Extraction engine to automatically identify facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble areas from unstructured first person feedback found in surveys, service and call center notes, emails, web forums, blogs, news articles and other forms of customer contact. Attensity turns the first person feedback into “First Person Intelligence”, enabling Attensity users to proactively understand and rapidly react to customer issues and requests. They also have the ability to discover product and/or service offering opportunities as well as potential areas for improvement. Attensity VoC On-Demand also offers a quick start implementation program, which includes appropriate data preparation – dictionary, domain and categorization development – to prepare data sets for extraction and output views and dashboards. Users can develop predefined analysis views, known as query templates, and dashboards tailored to the user organization’s requirements. http://www.attensity.com

Sign up for our “Beyond Search” Report

We’ll be publishing our special report by Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search: What to do When you’re Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work soon – most likely at the beginning of April, and have set-up a page where you can sign-up to be notified when the report will be available at . There will also be a special price for early orders and we’ll be providing that info shortly.
Steve has also set-up a page describing the report at: , and has a blog where he is providing some supplementary material. Also keep an eye on Lynda’s blog where she might have some comments while she is doing some editing.

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