Relational Navigation: Unifying Discovery, Access and Participation

Have you ever felt like the more access to information you have, the more difficult decision-making has become? Corporations thrive on digital information today and billions of dollars are spent yearly in order to improve the generation, access, management and archive of structured data and unstructured content, all in the name of improved productivity. But have these improvements in our ability to create and manage business information truly improved corporate productivity, or at a minimum, the productivity of information-based employees?

Demand for information is exploding and the days of brochure-ware websites are long gone. Information is being produced and consumed at a continually increasing rate. People are demanding more information, from more points of view, and more ways to participate than ever before. You can see this being led by consumer sites. The most visited sites are no longer
pure content sites. They are content aggregators that have a strong social network/collaboration component—sites like www.myspace.com, www.digg.com, and www.flikr.com. While we don’t expect nor want to turn your site into myspace, there are definitely transferable lessons to be learned for the enterprise.

Essentially, your content alone is not enough. The big question is: how do I get interest and maintain relevance while maintaining editorial control over the information flow?

Audience requirements are also maturing:

• For consumers, it’s about “findability”. A highly usable and useful source of rich information is where they will consistently return to for answers to questions or the desire to browse new subjects.
• For contributors, (enthusiasts, editors, remixers) it’s about “editorial control”. High productivity power tools for remixing, tagging, annotating and playlisting content and data into a niche market navigation site quickly will deliver the real-time requirements of this audience.
• For publishers, it’s about “enhanced relevance increases eyeballs”. A source of consumer-generated metadata that can increase the value of core content and data offerings drives user visits and stickiness.
• For advertisers, it’s about “precise placement of advertising”. Delivering higher yield ads based on navigation rather than keywords.

One of the unanticipated by-products of Moore’s Law is the explosive growth of data. Since computing power and resources are doubling every 18 months, the data created and stored as a result of that computing power has grown exponentially. According to an AP article published on www.cnn.com on March 6, 2007, “Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes—161 exabytes—of digital information last year.”

To deal with this flood of business content we need a new approach to information search and navigation. Most organizations still rely on traditional keyword search technology in spite of its limitations. Traditional portals, search engines and enterprise search tools are good at retrieving a large data set, but are poor at leading the viewer quickly through the results to get to the specific information required.

Today, you have three fundamental choices for exploring and discovering information buried across and outside of your enterprise. These three methodologies are shown in the graphic below.

With relational navigation, people do not need to guess how to ask for information they need (like they do with search engines) because relevant content is presented to them to explore. They immediately get a sense of all the content that is available on a particular topic. Navigation is the perfect marriage between the “bird’s eye” perspective and “bug’s eye” view.

Navigation is “the act of steering a course through a medium.” The digital equivalent of real-world navigation is relational navigation. It answers two questions for the user. Like a map, it tells us “what’s out there.” Once we identify our destination, it tells us “how to steer a course from here to our goal.” Traditional keyword search in contrast makes us grope blindly at potential destinations. It doesn’t help us find our way.

User-Controlled Information Access

Organizations are recognizing the convergence of information consumers and producers and are now looking for ways to implement effective solutions for more user-controlled information access. A recent Siderean Seamark application for a leading software company enabled the client’s customers to achieve a new level of information access and community. By aggregating multiple sources of content into a single information portal with a common search-and-browse metaphor, this