Federated Search is Good-the Semantics for True Contextual Search is the Tough part

I came across this recent post  The evolving federation of search’ http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/The-evolving-federation-of-search--51415.aspx and thought the money quote from Sue Feldman was "If you understand you can get at this information without having to sort it or structure it in any way ahead of time—although you certainly can—and that it doesn't require that you have the same structure across multiple information sources—that's really the beauty of these technologies”

Yes federation of search produces better findability but that’s the easier issue to address.... its the semantics for true contextual search that’s the tough part.

The enterprise and web information access and search market is bursting at the seams with new products that focus on Semantic Enhancement, which is designed to add contextual meaning across a variety of enterprise applications, databases, content repositories and the Web.

Most of today’s solutions that index and normalize information (data and content) fail to completely resolve  metadata and contextual semantic relationships. More comprehensive methods that require building and maintaining ‘knowledge models’ are human capital intensive and expensive.Today, tens of millions of dollars are spent on paying skilled knowledge workers to "manage" metadata taxonomies and ontologies.

While ‘knowledge models’ and machine AI can approximate to the skill, accuracy and speed of a human being to find meaningful patterns in data we at iQuest Analytics believe that the greatest pattern matcher is still the human brain....at least for the next 15 - 20 years ;)

With iQuest BlueAnt we allow patterns in the data based on grammatical network relationships to assist the skilled knowledge worker to infer relevant meaning with context. By creating a rich semantic knowledge structure index we allow users to uncover more relevant information with ‘Contextual Search and Analysis with Intelligent Discovery’ for better sense-making that’s crucial for uncovering hidden patterns and relationships with actionable insights.

 

- Steve Ardire, iQuest EVP Strategy