Archive for the ‘Information management’ Category

Tobias Larsson Hult

Metadata: What is it and what is it good for?

september 3 - 2010 | Tobias Larsson Hult
After reading a blog post explaining the word stemming, I started thinking about other words that are commonly used in a Findability solution and might need some explanation. The word that first came to my mind was ”Metadata”. It’s inevitable to talk about Metadata when you’re talking about Findability. So what is Metadata and why do we need it?

According to Wikipedia, metadata is defined as data about data. That might sound a bit abstract, but what it means is that metadata provides a bit more information about some content whether it’s a piece of text, an image, a video or something else. For a text metadata can be the file format it’s stored as (plain text, word, pdf, etc) and for an image metadata can be the resolution of the image.

Metadata can be divided into different types. Exactly what the types are is not set but  I like to think of metadata that is either a) technical or b) descriptive.

Technical metadata represents ”hard” types assigned automatically by systems like file type, file size, creation date, encoding etc. Descriptive metadata represents more ”soft” metadata assigned by humans like author, title, summary, keywords, category etc.

Technical metadata is often a finite set that can be common accross organisations, where descriptive metadata is more related to the organisation’s needs and structure.

So all this talk about metadata, why do we need to worry about this in a findability solution? Well, since metadata tells us a bit more about our content, we should use this to help our users to find their information quicker. I like to think that metadata can be used in at least three ways in a findability solution; relevance influence, navigation, and result presentation.

So if you define descriptive metadata that makes sense to the users in your organisation, they are very likely to assign them to content they are creating. When content has a high degree of metadata assigned you can use this to help users navigate to the content by using the metadata instead of a fixed folder-like structure. When searching, you can tune the relevance so that if the user’s query matches content in the metadata of the document, it is ranked higher than other documents.

The important thing about metadata is that if you can make users assign it to their content it can be used in many different ways and applications to help people find their content quickly.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Search and Business Intelligence?

juli 9 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

BI and search is a never ending story.
A number of years ago Gartner coined “Biggle” – which was an expression for BI meeting Google. Back then a number of BI vendors, among them Cognos and SAS, claimed that they were working with search strategically (e.g. became Google One-box partners). Search vendors, like FAST, Autonomy and IBM also started to cooperate with companies such as Cognos. ”The Adaptive Warehouse” and “BI for the masses” soon became buzzwords that spread in the industry.

The skeptics claimed that Enterprise Search never would be good at numbers and that BI never with text.
Since then a lot a lot has happened and today the major vendors within Enterprise Search all claim to have BI solutions that can be fully integrated (and the other way around – BI solutions that can integrate with Enterprise search).

The aim is the same now as back then:  to provide unified access to both structured (database) and unstructured (content) corporate information. As FAST wrote in a number of ‘Special Focus’: “Users should have access to a wide variety of data from just one, simple search interface, covering reports, analysis, scorecards, dashboards and other information from the BI side, along with documents, e-mail and other forms of unstructured information”.

And of course, this seems appealing to customers. But does access to all information really make us more likely to take the right decisions in terms of Business Intelligence. Gartner is in doubt.
Nigel Rayner, research vice president at Gartner Inc, says that ” The problem isn’t that they (users) don’t have access to information or tools; they already have too much information, and that’s just in the structured BI world. Now you want to couple it with unstructured data? That’s a whole load of garbage coming from the outside world”. But he also states that search can be used as one part of BI: “Part of the problem with traditional BI is that it’s very focused on structured information. Search can help with getting access to the vast amount of structured information you have”

Looking at the discussions going on in forums, in blogs and in the research domain most people seem to agree with Gartner’s view: search and BI makes a powerful combination, but the integrations needs to be made with a number of things in mind:

Data quality
As mentioned before, if one wants to make unstructured and structured information available as a complement to BI it needs to be of a good quality. Knowing that the information found is the latest copy and written by someone with knowledge of the area is essential. Bad information quality is a threat to an Enterprise Search solution, to a combined BI- and search solution it can be devastating. Having Content Lifecycles in place (reviewing, deleting, archiving etc) is a fundamental prerequisite.

Data analysis
Business Intelligence in traditionally built on pre-thought ideas of what data the users need, whereas search gives access to all information in an ad-hoc manner.
To combine these two requires a structured way of analyzing the data. If the unstructured information is taken out of its context there is a risk that decisions are built on assumptions and not fact.

BI for the masses?
The old buzzwords are still alive, but the question mark remains. If one wants to give everyone access to BI-data it has to be clear what the purpose is. Giving people a context , for example combining the latest sales statistics with searches for information about the ongoing marketing activities serves a purpose and improves findability. Just making numbers available does not.

BI and search dashboard

BI and search in a combined dashboard - vision or reality within a near future?

So, to conclude: Gartner’s vision of “Biggle” is not yet fulfilled. There are a number of interesting opportunities for the business to create Findability solutions that combines BI and search, but the strategies for adopting it needs to be developed in order to create the really interesting cases.

Have you come across any successful search and BI integrations? What is your vision? Do you think the integration between the two is a likely scenario?
Please let us know by posting your comments.

It’s soon time for us to go on summer vacation.

If you are Swedish, Nicklas Lundblad from Google had an interesting program about search (Sommar i P1) the other day, which is available as a pod

Have a nice summer all of you!

Christopher Wallstrom

Enterprise Search 2.0?

november 30 - 2009 | Christopher Wallstrom

While visiting Enterprise Search Summit in San Jose I realized that enabling Enterprise 2.0 within enterprise search is the hottest trend at the moment.

Andrew McAfee who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has released a book on the subject, spoke about how to use altruism to develop the enterprise. People are wired to help and if we stop obsessing about the risks and lower the bars for how people can help each other it is possible to make this work within a corporate environment.

He also spoke about how process control and how much workflow control. How much do we really need? Make it easy to correct mistake instead of making it hard to make them. With regards to innovation he pointed out that we need to question credentialism and build communities that people want to join. To leverage the intelligence aspects within the enterprise we should explore and experiment with collective intelligence such as prediction markets and open peer review processes. All in all make it easy for people to interconnect.

Very high improvement in access to knowledge, internal experts, satisfaction, increased innovation and customer satisfaction.

I also recommend to read Price Waterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast Summer 2008 to get a good overview of the available tools and technologies.

So how does this impact enterprise search? Search can be made to be the facilitator for Enterprise 2.0. Of course it is possible to index and make all blogs, wikipedias, tweets (yammer), online communities and social networks searchable, but that is only one way to make it this new environment more findable. If someone tweets or blogs about information we should use that information to impact on the search results and ranking. We could also track user behavior on a site to make certain information more visible with regards to implicitly expressed interests.