Monday, May 9, 2011
W1: Which Search Technology Is Right for You?
9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering, Inc
Whether you’re planning your first enterprise search implementation or preparing to replace your existing enterprise search technology, you need to know what steps to take before you even talk to any vendors in order to ensure your eventual success. Many organizations end up buying more search engine then they need and wasting money, while others try to save money and, in doing so, ensure failure of their project by spending too little.This “search engine mismatch” can lead to poor implementations and unhappy users. In this session, you’ll learn how to analyze your own “data environment” to understand capabilities and features you really need in your search infrastructure. This workshop answers these questions and more and provides some real-world scenarios that can help you make sense of the options and gain a better understanding of the kinds of environments in which some of the leading technologies make sense.
W2: Enterprise Semantic Infrastructure: Semantic Search and Beyond
9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect, KAPS Group
Even though the creation, management, and utilization of information is critical to today’s enterprises, not many organizations approach these tasks in a holistic and integrated way.This workshop presents such an approach by focusing on the semantic infrastructure of organizations. This semantic infrastructure approach starts with an articulated strategic vision that includes technology (search, content management, text analytics), content structures (taxonomies,metadata, categorization, and entity extraction), and the semantic component of business processes. The workshop also covers the various roles in creating and maintaining the semantic infrastructure and concludes with a look at the kinds of applications that can be built on this semantic infrastructure including semantic-based content management, enterprise search and search based applications, and other applications such as text mining and semantic social media applications.
W3: Now the Hard Work Starts: Achieving Search Satisfaction
1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus LtdMiles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering, Inc
Once you’ve installed or upgraded your search application, the real work begins: understanding how to implement all of the really cool technology that you saw in search tool sales demos. This workshop will help you best plan and deploy your search solution—maximizing its built-in features as well as strategically employing a variety of methods—to achieve your business objectives. Topics covered include establishing a search support team, implementing best bets, faceted search, entity extraction, federated search, search log analysis, and taxonomies, along with many other tools and techniques that will help ensure that users report total satisfaction with their search experience.
W4: Building Taxonomies for Search and Autocategorization
1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Heather Hedden, Senior Analyst, Project Performance Corporation
The use of taxonomies improves search results with both improved precision and recall. Relevant content is less likely missed and irrelevant content is less likely retrieved. Search engines that integrate their technology with taxonomies are often called autoclassification or autocategorization systems.Although the indexing is automatic, and even taxonomy enhancement can be automatic, the designing and initial building of a taxonomy is not. This workshop provides best practices for designing and building taxonomies specifically for use in search, including the creation and wording of terms, synonyms, and hierarchical relationships. Other topics covered include search taxonomy and navigational taxonomy comparisons, autocategorization technologies, and tools for taxonomy management and autocategorization. This workshop takes selections from a full-day continuing education workshop the presenter had taught at Simmons Collect Graduate School of library and information science and also draws on the chapter “Taxonomies for Automated Indexing” from the presenter’s book, The Accidental Taxonomist.