Semantic Search

Today’s rapid-paced business environment is forcing companies to find new ways to compete and respond to an increasingly dynamic marketplace. Organizations are required to focus on improving information findability and collaboration among information workers as a way to improve corporate agility and increase the performance of globally distributed project teams.

Many see improved collaboration and more effective enterprise search as the next steps to better leverage the knowledge of today’s information workers. Technology that enables collaboration solves a real business problem, improves current business processes and corporate responsiveness, and delivers real competitive advantage.

Implementation and rapid adoption of enterprise applications and collaboration technologies, however, is creating a burden for many IT teams, which are frequently caught in the middle between two sets of organizational requirements. While the CFO or COO wants management control, security, repeatability and predictability, project teams want speed, flexibility and accessibility. Unfortunately for many organizations, the underlying problem is semantics (aka metadata), which are not synchronized between departments or teams, making it difficult and expensive to bridge the gap for IT teams.

IT also faces the challenge of integrating rapidly proliferating collaboration sites in the already complex corporate knowledge infrastructure. The proliferation of data sources and the need to empower project teams and managers with real-time information becomes more complex as collaboration sites distribute corporate knowledge more broadly and with less centralized control.

This broad distribution of corporate knowledge is also a challenge for any enterprise working to improve search functionality and maintain compliance standards, security and access controls and industry regulations.

Organizations need solutions that enable collaboration within a managed environment that allows information to be easily found, reused and distributed.

Organizations today typically deploy a variety of enterprise and collaboration solutions from document-focused enterprise content management systems to intranet and project collaboration portals. What has evolved from this approach is a burgeoning number of information silos that isolate content and information across the enterprise.

To help find and use this information, enterprises have deployed enterprise search applications. Most of today’s employees have high expectations of search, wanting instant, accurate results. Unfortunately, much of the information throughout the enterprise is stored in silos and is not truly searchable. The categories and classifications in many enterprise search applications use inconsistent semantics, producing search results that fall short of what is needed.

To counteract this inconsistency, many organizations have also deployed “text mining” or “text analytics” tools to extract
key words and phrases, or metadata. Unfortunately, these tools cannot apply metadata consistently across the enterprise nor provide an understanding of context, or relationships between information.

The Complete Solution

Businesses now realize the importance of deploying corporate standards and solutions to manage enterprise terminologies and their interrelationships in a systematic fashion. This can ensure robust integration of complex business and content management systems, and dramatically improve enterprise search capabilities and accuracy of search results.

Organizations need a common enterprisewide language, or semantic standard, that is flexible, can respond in real time and can enable all users of the collaboration environment to easily classify or tag information quickly and consistently.

Business semantics management (BSM) transforms the development of enterprise semantics standards into an operational process. BSM helps close the loop on the document creation and distribution process.

BSM solutions must do the following:

• Enable services that simplify and automate the creation and usage of tags;
• Fit easily into existing workflows and application usage patterns to allow collaboration users to access controlled
  vocabularies and tags from existing applications and portals;
• Provide the capability to model the complexity and scale of the language of the enterprise;
• Integrate smoothly with existing enterprise information architecture;
• Allow all business and technical users to access the model and collaborate to enrich and expand the terms and relationships in dynamic, real-time;
• Provide the enterprise with the ability to monitor compliance of the content descriptions against the corporate standard and proactively identify and manage areas of non-compliance; and
• Optimize enterprise search systems by managing, reconciling and evolving taxonomies and metadata.

The SchemaLogic Solution

SchemaLogic has developed a technology framework that enables companies to model the structures and relationships of the business semantics that define corporate knowledge and content. The SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite facilitates dynamic changes to the business semantics model through a Web-based governance and collaboration process that enables participation across organizational, corporate and industry boundaries and facilitates the development of business semantics in a dynamic, constantly changing environment.

SchemaLogic automates real-time deployment of the model to all affected systems, including databases, repositories, integration technologies, portals and user interfaces. With a single semantics model governing the entire enterprise, employees will be able to find the right information the first time—through more comprehensive and effective enterprise search functionality.

SchemaLogic helps organizations to deploy new business models by accelerating information access and delivery, and helping customers reduce operational costs through better information management, increased collaboration and data quality, and more agile, intelligent business decisions 
 

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For more information about SchemaLogic, call: 425-885-9695 or visit www.schemalogic.com.

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