Tuesday, November 6

Like a Bach fugue, the search market in 2007 has more parallel themes than anyone can follow: extended search platforms, appliances, hosted search, embedded search in task-targeted applications, site search, desktop search, Web search for business, search + text mining for BI or customer support. There’s a good reason for the confusion, as well as the current feeding frenzy: Information management and access may be the last big computing platform to emerge, and no vendor has a lock on it today. From unifying access to silos of information, to software integration, and, eventually, to conversational systems that have a modicum of language understanding, these new applications will change how people interact with computers. The result is a market that is both consolidating and fracturing. In this keynote address, Sue Feldman will discuss current trends and look into what the future for search technologies will look like.

This session illustrates the potential of a unified search solution and provides insight into how to convey the value of this type of initiative to the business strategy team. Sam Mefford will balance technical depth and business relevancy to share real knowledge of how these solutions are implemented, covering three key concepts: 1) how to communicate the value of an enterprise search solution, including systems maintainability, user experience, and return on investment; 2) how to respect security across disparate data sources; 3) how to use enterprise search as a platform for any and all read-only applications within an organization.

In June, IEEE launched a free, federated vertical search capability, Scitopia.org, to enable users to explore highly cited research from scholarly work and patents in a single click. The objective was to offer a single search platform with direct access to the collective content of 3 million articles from 13 scholarly societies. Hear how IEEE managed the challenging issues

The Advertising Research Foundation, a professional membership organization, sought to achieve two goals: to easily search and access shared files and to provide members with an online knowledgebase that would help answer their questions and enable discovery, both within a short timeframe and ideally without the need for extensive prep work. In this presentation, Steve Rappaport, Director of Knowledge Solutions, will walk through the thought process, evaluation approaches, and work required to create the services the foundation will launch by the end of the year.

Over the past several years, analysts, reporters, and vendors have been making predictions that collaboration tools, social tagging, wikis, and other Web 2.0 phenomena would become mainstream within the enterprise. As adoption of Web 2.0 functionality hits the enterprise, the question still remains: How can enterprises effectively integrate these Web-based tools into their corporate intranets to increase employee productivity and collaboration? The answer is through search. This session discusses how corporations can benefit by using enterprise search as a collaborative platform to promote sharing and communication among its employees.

Like a Bach fugue, the search market in 2007 has more parallel themes than anyone can follow: extended search platforms, appliances, hosted search, embedded search in task-targeted applications, site search, desktop search, Web search for business, search + text mining for BI or customer support. There’s a good reason for the confusion, as well as the current feeding frenzy: Information management and access may be the last big computing platform to emerge, and no vendor has a lock on it today. From unifying access to silos of information, to software integration, and, eventually, to conversational systems that have a modicum of language understanding, these new applications will change how people interact with computers. The result is a market that is both consolidating and fracturing. In this keynote address, Sue Feldman will discuss current trends and look into what the future for search technologies will look like.

You’ve gotten a court order to produce highly detailed electronic documents, records, e-mails, and voice-mail messages. You think you have access to all the information you need. Think again. This practical session will provide step-by-step advice on how to prepare for an ediscovery process, including who from your organization should be included in your e-discovery assessment group, how to collect and control data, where to look for hidden data, and which technologies are most effective in helping you keep control of your data.

Over the years, the accumulation of data used by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has become voluminous, and processing and generating compliance reports for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were labor-intensive and time-consuming. To
address the problem, the department implemented a natural language structured search solution that allows nontechnical users to conduct real-time ad hoc reporting that helps resolve environmental issues before they become a public health concern. Demonstration of the solution will show how semantics, ontology, and natural language queries can provide a new level of structured search capability to a
large governmental organization.

Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Raritan Technologies Search is a service; no, it’s an application; no, it’s a utility. Search is all of those things. Search is foundational and can be considered a platform for offering a variety of information access functions. By understanding the implications of a search framework, each application’s characteristics can be fully leveraged for optimum precision and recall. This means that common search requirements are bundled and organized according to the most effective approach: use of a plug-and-play search appliance, development of faceted search, clustering algorithms, auto-categorization, stored queries, and so on.  A search platform facilitates distributed search and federated search by connecting various search mechanisms while retaining source context. This session explores developing a search platform using integration frameworks and Web services.

From the enterprise search site to search-embedded applications to expertise discovery, Accenture's enterprise search solution starts with Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007. Understand the decision factors. See the current applications. Hear about the challenges and how they were overcome. Learn about the future direction of search inside Accenture.

Learn how Intellisearch can assist searchers to automatically find relevant information both inside and outside a corporation. By making relevant and applicable content automatically available to you from your company’s unique content, you can leverage existing corporate knowledge, leading to the discovery of new facts as the document works for you! This presentation will include real-world customer cases
showing enterprise search in knowledge-based environments.