This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of search technology and yet many organizations still do not have a strategy for their investment in search. In this presentation at Findability Day 2013 Martin White looks at some of the search technologies that will have an impact on organizational performance over the next few years, including sentiment analysis, the integration of big data and enterprise search and in particular the importance of enterprise mobile search applications.
For more information about Findability Day, go to findwise.com/findability-day-2013
Generative Artificial Intelligence: How generative AI works.pdf
The Future of Search - Martin White
1. Intranet Focus Ltd
The future of search
Findwise Findability Day
30 May 2013
Martin White
Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd.
martin.white@intranetfocus.com
@intranetfocus
3. Agenda
A very short history of search and big data
Information as a business asset
Metadata tagging
Finding people and expertise
Mobile enterprise search
Big data and enterprise search
Content analytics
Semantic search
Sentiment analysis
Digital workplaces
www.intranetfocus.com
6. Metadata tagging
There is an increasing awareness of the value in tagging
content
However this value is not enough to justify human tagging
even if consistency issues can be addressed
There is a significant amount of research being undertaken
into passive (computer-generated) metadata
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 WG2 is the Working Group that
develops international standards for metadata and related
technologies
ISO 25964 is the international standard for thesauri and
interoperability with other vocabularies
This is why organisations need information scientists!
www.intranetfocus.com
7. Searching for expertise
Searching for people and expertise is the single most
important task in any organisation
The challenges are summed up by David Snowden
Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.
We only know what we know when we need to know it.
In the context of real need few people will withhold their
knowledge.
The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
We always know more than we can say, and we always say more
than we can write down.
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/km-seven-principles
Relying on people creating expertise profiles is not the
answer
www.intranetfocus.com
15. Mobile search
Will require a radical re-appraisal of the search process
For the first time users will want to
Start a search on a desk top and transfer it to a mobile device
Start a search on a mobile device and transfer it to a desktop
Search as a team
Print out results on a remote basis
Use natural search interfaces such as voice and swipe
Use GPS as a search parameter
Virtually no research has yet been carried out on mobile
search outside of some stand-alone consumer services
Collaborative search is an extension of mobile search
Will stimulate voice technologies
www.intranetfocus.com
17. Big Data and Enterprise Search
The ratio between structured data and unstructured data
will vary between companies and sectors
But both will be present and each has a dependency on
the other
www.intranetfocus.com
http://info.marklogic.com/post-relational-reality-dbta-survey-2012.html
18. The best of both worlds
The benefits come from being able to integrate
Big Data with Enterprise Search
www.intranetfocus.com
http://www.aiim.org/pdfdocuments/IW_Big-Data_2012.pdf
21. Search-based applications
To make these work requires a lot of business analysis and
the combination of structured and unstructured
information
A number of challenges have still not been fully addressed
Given the high level of dissatisfaction with search will users trust
an SBA?
How open will the SBA be to personal optimisation?
How sensitive will the SBA be to changes in data and information
quality?
Will it be possible to connect SBAs on different platforms?
Solving these and other challenges will require a cross-
functional and cross-technology teams which are normally
absent in most organisations
www.intranetfocus.com
24. Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis enables organisations to monitor a wide
range of information sources for positive and negative
signals about author opinions
Analysis can be carried out at
Document level
Sentence level
Aspect based
Comparative level
Convergence of search and text analytics
www.intranetfocus.com
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/4/162501-techniques-and-applications-for-sentiment-analysis/fulltext
25. Semantic technologies
Semantic technologies include
Auto-categorization
Concept analysis
Concept and entity extraction
Content data normalizing
Federating and de-duplicating
Natural language processing (NLP)
Sentiment analysis
Text mining and text analytics
There is not a single ‘semantic’ technology and each
vendor and research group has a different view and
different priorities
www.intranetfocus.com
26. Monitoring the enterprise
During the course of the working day we need to keep a
track of
Emails
Blogs
Microblogs
Wikis
Discussion forums
Team sites
Document additions and updates
RSS feeds
External information services
We need more than just the delta changes, but also to
monitor
Trends
Emerging issues
www.intranetfocus.com
28. Digital workplaces
Although there is still no consensus on a definition for a
‘digital workplace’ there is considerable interest in trying to
understand the value of a digital workplace
Search, and in particular search-based applications and
search-as-a-service, could have a core role to play as an
integration platform across multiple applications and
repositories, including those of suppliers and customers
www.intranetfocus.com