Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

These items help further separate semantic search from keyword search, while also providing a means for machine-to-machine communication, which enables the search engine to search multiple repositories. Gary Price, editor of ResourceShelf and director of online information resources at Ask.com, defines metadata as using a controlled vocabulary to decide what the record or document is about. Another way of looking at it, according to Chris Davis, CEO of semantic search company Semantra, is to think of metadata as “data about data.” Siderean’s Allen says that while search is first and foremost a human activity, using metadata does help to search across different data sources. “By using semantics you can create overlaying organization coming from disparate sources like structured database, content repositories, RSS feeds, and so forth, and create semantic structures to consider them. Semantics give people a way of organizing information across different sources.” He says this enables users to leverage this information to extract data without having to go through pages of results. Like ontologies, creating quality metadata is not easy, but Allen believes that there are ways to simplify the process. He says, “The challenge we face is building they are.” For instance, if the keyword is “Joe Smith,” they see he is a person who works at Ford Motor Co., which is in the auto industry, and so forth. Finding Meaning Imagine entering a search term or question and having the search engine understand the query, break down the semantic subtleties, and produce a set of results organized and divided further by possible meaning. Moulton says there is currently no such search tool out there that does this explicitly, but that is the ultimate goal of semantic search researchers.They hope to make the search experience approximate the library experience, in which users will browse the possibilities in an organized way to find the types of information they are seeking without having to know any special rules. She says this goes far beyond relevance ranking and the navigation model we use today. “True semantic search is the idea that nobody has to know any special syntax. You can just start asking questions and by the way you ask the questions and the contextual material you include in the query part, you are going to get back richer results that are right on target. It’s not going to be relevance-ranked. It’s going to be ranked according to the question you asked. That’s really what semantic search is,” says Moulton. She adds that this way of searching more closely mirrors a time-honored information-seeking process. According to Moulton, “It’s beginning to approximate the whole process of the reference model that a librarian would engage in by helping to narrow down the results by entering into a dialog with the person asking the questions. I think the concept of language here is really huge.” With semantic search you can browse the content, so not only can you find the most relevant information, you can see the gaps in content, something that wouldn’t be possible with today’s search technology. In a sense, it brings back the browsing of the search directory, but instead of just humans editing the directory, it adds a level of intelligence unsurpassed in the current generation of search tools. Semantic search provides the user with the ability to engage in an extended process of finding and following connections. As Allen describes it, “This is a much broader set of activities than relevance ranks can accommodate.” He adds that semantics expose relationships that enable the user to find a set of documents that specifically speak to the search query. Moulton explains that no search vendor is close to achieving true semantic search, but there are many examples out there now of search tools using semantic elements. As search engines become more intelligent, semantic search will enable enterprise users (and consumers) to move beyond keywords to find the information that matters most to them without the constraints of current search technology. We may have a ways to go, but the possibilities are quite intriguing. RON MILLER (ronsmiller@ronsmiller.com) is a freelance technology writer based in Massachusetts. WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM Using metadata enables users to better find content located in multiple repositories. Semantra uses this technology to extract data from structured databases. products so that burden is lifted off of IT and brought on the machine where it belongs.” One of the ways Siderean and others achieve this is through a process called entity extraction, which looks for broad categories called “entities” and applies the metadata to the entities. Russell Glass, VP of products and marketing at ZoomInfo, a company that uses semantic search techniques to extract business information, says his company uses entities to build richer results. “We crawl the same pages [as a conventional search engine], but instead of caring about keywords, we care about entities. When we look at a set of keywords, we see that keyword is actually referring to person, company, title, or an industry and we start to aggregate these entities and build information around them. And the semantic nature is that we are including extra data on top of keywords to help us understand where 45 http://Ask.com http://WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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