Category: Semantic technologies (Page 36 of 72)

It was inevitable that the search market would rapidly expand into the mobile device market and the number of new and established vendors with options for your cell phone or PDA is a daily feast of reading. Combined with other new search options promising voice-enabled search, semantic search, search federating internal with Web and deep Web content, the possibilities for having search served up to suit anyone seem endless.

Tracking over 70 vendors with enterprise search offerings is plenty for me to focus on at the moment. However, as I read the publicity releases and descriptions inviting me to be briefed, in the back of my mind I know that business travelers need access to all kinds of enterprise content regardless of their locale. I worry that my skepticism about mobile search for enterprise content says more about my age than the technology. I might be thinking about struggling with tiny screens and buttons in less than optimal viewing conditions. But I am open to the possibilities and know it will become pervasive, as will all the other flavors of search.

Caution: before jumping into hot new offerings for enterprise search or any other technology, take a deep breath and think about some consequences of being that early adopter.

Security models for enterprise search in which content is being aggregated or federated from across numerous structured and unstructured content repositories is a very big issue, takes lots of planning, mapping, and time to deploy and test. Add the considerations of a start-up vendor dealing with your precious knowledge assets in a wireless world and you might think twice.

Recent CIO Research, CIO Vendor Report Card results for 52 top IT vendors broke out statistics in several areas. The responding audience ranked as their highest priorities two that would be very hard to judge for a new offering:

• (Vendor) Delivers on Promises
• Ongoing Support after the Sale and Implementation

Another statistic that was reported in the CIO Vendor Report Card was a measure of the likelihood that the respondent would be willing to recommend the vendor. This reminds us of a critical issue that early adopters of new products and technologies can’t easily resolve, finding recommenders or product case studies.

I don’t want to pick on mobile search especially; there is so much hot stuff coming down the pipeline that it is easy to get carried away. But a sign to take it slowly is when your own enterprise is struggling to keep up with new releases of products from known companies, and lags behind in fully exploiting technology you already have. The hottest “must haves” won’t even make it through initial deployment in this environment. Making certain that enterprise search is working well within the organization is a necessary and critical first step. Having a vendor with a track record and happy customers is a close second.

Since an attempt to parse, in the simplest terms, the “enterprise search” market in January, I have been exposed to no less than 77 products and vendors whose offerings have been brought to my attention. Add to that another 20 or 30 peripheral offerings in the text mining and text analytics sphere and you’ll understand why the need for a focused view when considering products.

Selling and marketing at its best sells to a need. Need expresses something about users, user behaviors, user requirements, and problems to be solved. Need also implies emotions and that may present a problem when it comes to making business decisions.

Nothing plays into emotional business decisions like money, as illustrated by one IT manager’s reaction to this week’s Yahoo News story about Google offering its search appliance for small Web sites for $100 for up to 5,000 pages. Noting that $500/year would support up to 50,000 Web pages, he thought it could be a solution for the company’s intranet. In a tough budget situation it seemed to make sense because the maintenance fee for current search software far exceeds $500.

Let’s be clear, Google is offering site search for a Web site on the World-wide Web, not internal enterprise sites. There is a huge difference in the number of variables to be considered not the least of which are:

1. Who is authoring and maintaining the target content, and what do they expect to have the search engine do with the tags and content?
2. Who are the users, what are they looking for, and how do they expect it to be displayed?
3. What is the software providing in the way of managing and supporting metadata
4. Where is the software going to run and be maintained?
5. What are the security and authorization considerations?
6. What about all the internal content that is not “Web pages” (e.g. PDFs, spreadsheets, slide shows, images) with their associated metadata that may not be supported in this license but are fundamental to an enterprise search solution
7. What do page ranking and ad management have to do with internal search requirements?

Just to be clear, there are other solutions that may come with levels of Web site search support that are more suited to many small organizations, internal and external. This week I learned more about one such offering, PicoSearch that has options from free to very reasonable monthly charges bundled with service for hosting search for an organization’s content. It can also provide some levels of password protection and security controls. This may not be an optimal choice for organizations with complex and multi-faceted search interfaces but could be perfect for associations, educational institutions, and small businesses with straightforward product lines.

Keep in mind, inexpensive does not mean “cheap” and it is also not the first qualifying criteria for what is “appropriate.”

I participated in one search vendor’s user conference this week, and a webinar sponsored by another. Both impressed me because they expressed values that I respect in the content software industry and they provided solid evidence that they have the technology and business delivery infrastructure to back up the rhetoric.

You have probably noted that my blog is slim on comments about specific products and this trend will continue to be the norm. However, in addition to the general feeling of good will from Endeca customers that I experienced at Endeca Discover 2007, I heard clear messages from sessions I attended that reinforced the company’s focus on helping clients solve complex content retrieval problems. Complexity is inherent in enterprises because of diversity among employees, methods of operating, technologies deployed and varied approaches to meeting business demands at every level.

In presentations by Paul Sonderegger and Jason Purcell care was given to explain Endeca’s approach to building their search technology solutions and why. At the core is a fundamental truth about how organizations and people function; you never know how a huge amount of unpredictably interconnected stuff will be approached. Endeca wants its users to be able to use information as levers to discover, through personalized methods, relationships among content pieces that will pry open new possibilities for understanding the content.

Years ago I was actively involved with a database model called an associative structural model. It was developed explicitly to store and manipulate huge amount of database text and embodied features of hierarchical, networked and relational data structures.

It worked well for complex, integrated databases because it allowed users to manipulate and mingle data groups in unlimited ways. Unfortunately, it required a user to be able to visualize the possibilities for combining and expressing data from hundreds of fields in numerous tables by using keys. This structural complexity could not easily be taught or learned, and tools for simple visualization were not available in the early 1980s. As I listened to Jason Purcell describe Endeca’s optimized record store, and concept of “intra-query” to provide solutions for the problems posed by double uncertainty I thought, “They get it.” They have acknowledged the challenge of making it simple to update, use and exploit vast knowledge stores; they are working hard to meet the challenge. Good for them! We all want flexibility to work the way we want but if it is not easy we will not adopt.

In a KMWorld webinar, Vivisimo’s Jerome Pesente and customer Arnold Verstraten of NV Organon co-presented with Matt Brown of Forrester Research. The theme was search security models. Besides the reasons for up-front consideration for security when accessing and retrieving from enterprise repositories, three basic control models were described. All three were based on access control lists (ACLs), how and why they are used by Vivisimo.

Having worked with defense agencies, defense contractors and corporations with very serious security requirements on who can access what, I am very familiar with the types of data structures and indexing methods that can be used. I was pleased to hear the speakers address trade-offs that include performance and deployment issues. It served to remind me that organizations do need to be thinking about this early in the selection process; inability to handle the most sensitive content appropriately should eliminate any enterprise search vendor that tries to equivocate on security. Also, as Organon did, there is nothing that demonstrates the quality of the solution like a “bake-off” against a sufficient corpus of content that will demonstrate whether all documents and their metadata that must not be viewed by some audiences in fact are always excluded from search results for all in those restricted audiences. Test it. Really test it!