DOCUMENT Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 20) p BLUEPRINTS FOR DESIGNING A SUCCESSFUL DOCUMENT STRATEGY w/kevin craine p free webcast p june 10th / 2pm est 8 $W DOCUMENTmedia.com our sales pipeline in the first half of the year?,” into the technical language of SQL, MDX and multi-dimensional data manipulations. Fortunately, this is about to change. Innovative vendors are beginning to provide products where, rather than learn an entire application, a sales rep might be able to just type into a search text box a sales question in the form of a statement, such as “list accounts scheduled to close before July 2008,” to generate a list of opportunities from a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Advanced language processing algorithms will eventually be able to parse common business language questions into SQL, a standard language for querying databases. >> Enterprise search tools will function as access points for one or more BI systems. Using federation approaches based on OpenSearch, XML, Google OneBox and other standards, enterprise search vendors can now pass queries to one or more back-end BI systems. Certain expressions in a search query, such as “financial report” or “expense summary,” can trigger a federation of the search query to a BI system. For example, an information worker might enter a query into the enterprise search engine and in the results list see reports from BI vendors who support connections for the OpenSearch or Google OneBox federation standards. This enables information workers to go to a single entry point to access all the data and content they need. The Converging World of Search 1 Information workers will be able to execute data queries via a search box using natural language. 2 Enterprise search tools will function as access points for one or more BI systems. 3 Visual data representations will increase understanding of linkages among concepts. >> Visual data representations will increase understanding of linkages among concepts. Some search vendors are already offering content cluster maps by means of which users can navigate through different ideas visually via a three-dimensional network of nodes (concepts) and connections. Other visual metaphors like heatmaps and geospatial information correlations that were first developed for data visualization in the BI context are now making their way into search products. This will give information workers more choices on the fly rather than having to pick one option, drill down, explore and then retreat to try another path. The Answer to What You Don’t Know Tradition has it that the answers to any structured BI query or text string search are only as good as the question posed. Although you might glean insight from the returned results, you might never know if the question you asked was the right one. Through the convergence of BI and search technologies, knowledge workers can begin to discover the information they didn’t know they didn’t know. As search gets more powerful and begins to understand the meaning behind unstructured text, entity extraction and other linguistic analysis methods will be able to be used to reveal unforeseen and highly illuminating connections among documents or between documents and data. For example, when doctors search an online medical database, 20 document june.08 www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com
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