Enterprise Search Solutions

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Tools and methods to find the information you need.

24 March 2005 (14-21)
Location: Sofitel Diegem (Diegem near Brussels (Belgium))
Presented in English by
Price: 480 EUR (excl. 21% VAT)

This event is history, please check out the List of Upcoming Seminars, or send us an email

Check out our related in-house workshops:

 Learning Objectives

Why this seminar ?

Imagine your worst nightmare: you're about to launch your web site, portal or intranet and you're demonstrating its features to your management. Pride and joy until the man or woman in charge takes the keyboard and types some keywords in the search box, expecting to retrieve the information on his or her pet subject.

Imagine the disappointment when the long list of results does not even resemble the expected documents or texts. Even bigger becomes the frustration when the navigation doesn't offer a clue at all how to browse to the very same desired information.

Unrealistic? Not at all - unfortunately. Poor search functionality turns out to be the number one weakness in many portal projects. IDC estimated that the typical knowledge worker spends up to 30 percent of their time looking for content on a corporation's networks, then an additional 25 percent of their time creating content that can't be found.

What's more: poor search functionality easily strikes the eye, a remedy against it is quite another story. The average user (in particular out on the public web) isn't willing to learn the terminology that is used within your organisation, being different from the every-day language he or she uses. The user cannot be bothered either by the fact that your company information is stored in a heterogeneous backend, and doesn't see the difference between information in applications or static content (which may be obvious for techies). And the average user expects search results in his or her own language ...

Good search functionality seldom is the result of simply applying some (indexing) technology. Search and retrieval has to be kept in mind while writing content, and while integrating the applications within your portal/intranet. And it has more to do with methodology than with technology (But that is true for every IT discipline ?). Enough reason for us to present you a seminar with experts on search and information architecture and 2 compelling case studies.

Questions answered during this seminar

• How to teach the search system to use synonyms, common typos, related search terms?
• How to generate a navigational structure using the contents of existing documents?
• How to produce meaningful short summaries to help the user's click-through decision
• How to convince my content creators to attribute sufficient and correct metadata?
• How to offer search functionality both through structured (databases) and unstructured data (documents)?
• How to target search functionality to specific audiences?

Check out our Search and Retrieval resource center!

Who should attend this seminar ?

• Information and communication managers
• Document, content and knowledge management managers

 Full Programme

• On content
  • exponential growth of internal and external information
  • 70% to 80% of all enterprise data is unstructured
• On search
• separate search tools for different information silos
• searching, but not finding
• searching on the web works, does it?
• On costs
• poor decisions based on poor information
• lost productivity due to employees not finding directly the info needed
• lost sales due to customer's inability to find products and services
• duplicated efforts since content is recreated

• How a search engine works
  • collecting the data
  • index the data
  • analyze the query
  • match the query with the index
  • process the resultset
• New trends in search
  • New datatypes
  • Text mining functionalities
    • producing summaries
    • extracting entities
    • extracting core concepts
  • Visualisation
• product overview
• Verity
• Autonomy
• Convera
• FAST
• Google
• What do the big players offer: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, ...

• metadata
  • definition
  • metadata modeling
• clustering and classification
  • Concepts
  • clustering versus classification
  • classification in categories versus taxonomies
  • Two aspects
  • editing and managing categories/ taxonomies
  • classification itself
  • technologies
    • rule based decision trees
    • naive bayes
    • k nearest neighbour
    • support vector machine
  • products
    • inXight Categorizer
    • Entrieva SemioTagger
    • Stratify Classification Server
    • Vivisimo
      
• faceted classification
  • concept
  • technologies
  • products
    • Endeca
    • i411
    • Seamark Navigator
    • ...

• News is a Belga's raw material and final product: its role is to classify, synthesize, package, distribute and document both text and multimedia sources. Customers want a fast or even realtime service, tailored to their needs - a business case for automation is quickly made.
• Belga has a search solutions mixture composed of Oracle Intermedia, BRS, a third party (customized) MySQL search and Autonomy. Stefaan Melis will explain the search methods Belga uses for its distinct content sources, and discuss the combined search solution that was implemented in a portal for news editors.
  

• The semantic web
• RDF
  • definition
  • syntax
  • using RDF
    • Tucana Knowledge Store
    • RDF Gateway
    • Seamark navigator
• Topic maps
  • definition
  • syntax
  • using Topic Maps
    • Ontopia Omnigator

• The Dutch ministry of Public Health and Sports makes tens of thousands of documents available via a search interface on its website.
• Erik Fransen will discuss how :
  • how search and navigation was designed with different kinds of users in mind (professionals versus citizens, people looking for a specific document versus people looking for information using vague search terms...)
  • metadata is used by the team of editorialists (adding several tens of documents per day)
  • the task of adding metadata is is made lighter by automatic summarization and attribution of keywords
  • important the thesaurus and continuing thesaurus maintenance is
  • the automatic classification, indexing and search tools were selected and implemented

 Speakers

Paul Hermans is Head of Information Architectures and Partner at  Amplexor, a company that specialises in Enterprise Content Management. He was founder and manager of Pro Text, a well-known SGML/XML consultancy company that has become part of Amplexor since 2003. Previously, he was the manager of the electronic publishing department of CED Samson, a
part of the Wolters Kluwer group. Since 1992, he was involved in many important Belgian SGML/XML projects at SWIFT, KBC, SD-Worx, Indicator, Union Minière, Barco, Philips, ...

Questions about this ? Interested but you can't attend ? Send us an email !