Jianchang Mao

Enterprise Search: Tough Stuff

The last decade has witnessed the growth of information retrieval from a boutique discipline in information and library science to an everyday experience for billions of people around the world. This revolution has been driven in large measure by the Internet, with vendors focused on search and navigation of Web resources and Web content management. Simultaneously, enterprises have invested in networking all of their information together to the point where it is increasingly possible for employees to have a single window into the enterprise. Although these employees seek Web-like experiences in the enterprise, the Internet and enterprise domains differ fundamentally in the nature of the content, user behavior, and economic motivations.

Thematic mapping - from unstructured documents to taxonomies

Verity Inc. has developed a comprehensive suite of tools for accurately and efficiently organizing enterprise content which involves four basic steps: (i) creating taxonomies, (ii) building classification models, (iii) populating taxonomies with documents, and (iv) deploying populated taxonomies in enterprise portals. A taxonomy is a hierarchical representation of categories. A taxonomy provides a navigation structure for exploring and understanding the underlying corpus without sifting through a huge volume of documents. Thematic Mapping automatically discovers a concept tree from a corpus of unstructured documents and assigns meaningful labels to concepts based on a semantic network. Integrating with Verity Intelligent Classifiers user-friendly GUI, a user can drill down a concept tree for navigation, perform a conceptual search to retrieve documents pertaining to a concept, build a taxonomy from the concept tree, as well as edit a taxonomy to tailor it into various views (customized taxonomies) of the same corpus. Classification rules can be generated automatically from concepts. These classification rules can be used for populating documents into the taxonomy.

Intelligent Taxonomy Management Tools for Enterprise Content

The taxonomy is the most popular way for organizing a large volume of content. A taxonomy, which is typically a hierarchical representation of categories, provides a navigation structure for exploring and understanding the underlying corpus without sifting through a huge volume of documents. Creating and maintaining taxonomies with a large volume of documents remains a daunting task facing many enterprises. Content organization process typically involves four basic steps: (i) creating taxonomies; (ii) building classification models; (iii) populating taxonomies with documents; and (iv) deploying populated taxonomies in enterprise portals. Each step in the process may have unique requirements that determine what techniques and tools are suitable for the tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive suite of tools developed by Verity Inc. for accurately, collaboratively, and efficiently organizing enterprise content.