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  • January 6, 2025
  • By Marydee Ojala Editor in Chief, KMWorld, Conference Program Director, Information Today, Inc.
  • Features

KMWorld Conference Wrap-Up and Look Ahead

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In the Enterprise AI World conference, Chad Mairn, St. Petersburg College, and Brian Pichman, Evolve Project, showed examples of how AI can spark creativity. Mairn demonstrated practical uses of computer vision for analysis, preservation, interactive experiences, and accessibility. He also highlighted Louis Markoya’s Virtual Exhibit in Spatial with the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art. Pichman and Mairn introduced uses of virtual reality in organizations and ended with these questions for the audience to consider:

How can your organization leverage AI for creative solutions?

How might AI enhance your current knowledge-sharing practices?

What ethical considerations should guide AI implementation?

Search Superpowers

Before knowledge can be shared, it must be found. Thus, enterprise search and discovery technology is integral to KM implementations. During the Enterprise Search & Discovery conference, co-located with KMWorld, GenAI was a major attraction, but not the only one. In many organizations, Share- Point takes center stage for search. David Patrick, DSA, Inc., provided tips and tricks for SharePoint Search from the basics (keywords, quotation marks, and Boolean operators) to advanced (property filters, wildcards, search refiners to narrow results). From a GenAI perspective, much of Patrick’s presentation hearkened back to an earlier time in search tech- nology. However, he ended with a look at what M365 Copilot will do to SharePoint search.

Along similar lines, Stan Vanneste, delaware, showed how to build your own M365 search, noting that search expectations have changed from keyword and semantic search to conversational search, in which you talk with your data. Use cases could involve local, global, or enterprise search, each with its own scenario. Setting up search requires understanding what index, LLM, connectors, administrative portal, and (possibly) AI studio is appropriate for the use case being considered. RAG to combat hallucinations is part of the development process. Conversational search, however, does not completely supplant older search technologies. They still have their place.

At MITRE, explained Pari Rajaram and Beth Lavender, their team harnessed the power of ChatGPT in the Azure cloud to create MITRE ChatGPT. They used MapReduce, RAG, vector search, agentic AI, and Azure AI Hybrid Search for various parts of the project. Marianne Sweeny, Daedalus Information Systems and the University of Washington, considered what comprises successful enterprise search. Information is an internal construct, and quality depends on individual contextual, situational, environmental, and emo- tional characteristics. She champions soft system thinking and risk mitigation.

Trends to Watch For

With a conference as large as KMWorld—it has three tracks, plus there are four other co-located conferences—suss- ing out trends often depends on which speakers you listened to and which conferences you attended. Overall, however, the major trend was that KM is thriving and has a bright future. Every aspect of the KMWorld conferences seemed rejuvenated.

The Taxonomy Boot Camp attracted both newcomers and experienced taxonomists. Recognition of the importance of robust taxonomies and ontologies and of the need for human oversight, even while acknowledging the potential of GenAI to simplify, shorten, and amplify the process, permeated that conference. Synchronicities between taxonomies and search were also very obvious. A common complaint of end users in the past was difficulties in finding the knowledge necessary to do their jobs. KM platforms, now often powered by GenAI, rely on modern and improved search technologies and on evolving and relevant taxonomies to become ever more central to job satisfaction.

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