Searching questions
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The unstructured revolution in search technology.
25 January 2006 Search technologies are undergoing a revolutionary change making it far easier to address the challenge of finding information amid the morass of unstructured corporate data.
Implicit query technology is making it far easier for organisations to capture and search the vast quantities of data not held in databases, said Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy, a maker of search tools.
Lynch told delegates at the Effective IT Summit in Cardiff: "Most search technology consists of an application with an underlying database. Search results are delivered according to how the document has been tagged. But that only addresses structured information, which accounts for just 20% of data."
The other 80% of information today exists in unstructured format - such as emails, voice calls, and multimedia files. "Our initial reaction is to add structure to unstructured information," said Lynch. "That is the wrong way of looking at the problem."
Lynch said for unstructured search, there should be just one platform for all data types and the data needs context.
"Implicit query is the ability of technology to read what is on screen. Because it has context, we have an automatic way of delivering the right information to the user. The principle considers what is conceptual first; then what is the most important factor," he said.
For example, in the sentence 'The Chinese Premier rode by car to meet the US president today', the words 'rode by car' are less important. Because the information value is low, it is ranked as less important.
As soon as prior information exists, however, there is context and that influences the relative search importance of the words. "If for example, an automotive magazine wanted to write up the story above, the words 'rode by car' would be much more important because of the context," said Lynch.
The beauty of implicit query, according to Lynch, is that it brings the information to the worker rather than making the user stop working to acquire information.
