The shameless self-promotion division of Shore is proud to announce that I'll be amongst the speakers at next week's SIIA Brown Bag Lunch panel presentation on Wednesday, 11 June focusing on how to attract, monetize and retain audiences and clients through search technologies. The panel will be moderated by Leslie Kues, Senior Director at Microsoft's FAST with my distinguished co-panelists Kate Noerr, Founder, Chairman & CEO of MuseGlobal, Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer for EveryZing and Barbara Kroll, Director, Corporate Strategy for Wolters Kluwer. It promises to be a great panel, including both publishers using search in enterprise and media markets as well as two leading technology companies helping publishers and enterprises to get more value from search as a publishing platform. Registration information is here, it's going to be available as a live event at the McGraw-Hill Building in New York as well as an online video event.

As for myself, I will be emphasizing how search is a publishing tool that is not just about the "white box" and a list of results but a technology that can enable content to be aggregated in a "just in time" publishing environment to support a wide variety of content applications for media and enterprise markets. If you're planning to come you may want to catch my earlier entry "Beyond Search Engines: The Database is Now" to get a feel as to how search engines are starting to replace databases as the primary content gathering mechanism for content applications and its implications for publishing. Long story short, the way that financial markets thought about stock tickers and trading room system middleware is how more advanced publishers are beginning to think about search engines.

Hope to see you at the brown bag - no food but plenty of beverages and great cookies - trust me.

Labels: everyzing, FAST Search and Transfer, federated search, museglobal, search, siia brown bag, wolters kluwer

There are rocket scientists, then there are rocket scientists - and then there's Barney Pell, long-time Silicon Valley startup maven and currently the Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Powerset. Barney is one of those rare people who has been a rocket scientist via both the NASA side of the term and the software industry side, an outlook that has helped him to assemble many teams through the years that have developed advanced search and language processing technologies. Powerset has unveiled its first effort recently at a new technology to provide rich content from semantic searches, an interesting look at how one can completely reshape the face of a content product via enhanced search technologies.

Using Wikidpedia as its primary target content, Powerset technology analyzes search phrases to come up with search results that match natural language phrases as well as keywords. This being a very early stage debut of technology some search targets work better than others and overall I'd have to say that it's a technology that seems to do best with people and things as opposed to concepts. For example, if you type in "Who is Bill Gates?" you get the screen similar to the top of the above screen grab, which includes a top deck of biographical information from the Freebase reference database followed by Powerset's sets of semantic analysis called "Factz" that focus on what the Wikipedia article says about this prominent figure. One of these sets, for example, tells us that Gates gave testimony, a speech, an address, a demo, a presentation and a deposition. You can click on any of these terms to get more details from the underlying article.

Below the initial bio and Factz information is a set of search results for the initial query, including the best-match article on Microsoft founder Bill Gates. This is in essence the straight Wikipedia article with links mapped over to Powerset's version of this content, along with a handy visual presentation of the article's outline on the right or another listing of key Factz organized within the article outline. I like some of the inferences that it's come up with in the Wikipedia definition of Content that I contributed a while back: "information provides value; experiences provide value; content provides value." True enough.

I like how Powerset prefixes organic search results with federated content, taking a best stab at results on very focused topics that enable people to obtain knowledge more quickly and effectively. The automatically generated Factz, though, suffer from the same problem that most semantic tools experience when they examine a very small data set: spotty inferences. For example, in the Factz about Bill Gates Powerset inferred that he founded Cher, an inference drawn from the fact that biographer Howard Johns was known for revealing the addresses of these and other celebrities. Hmm. Don't think that I'd put that info down on my "final Jepoardy" slate. I am also not so crazy about the organic search results, which tend to err on the side of word proximity. Again, with a relatively narrow data set such as Wikipedia it's not always easy to tune content analysis well to the capabilities of semantic text analysis in search engines.

The big picture for this early-days release of Powerset is that it is a great demonstration of how one particular source of content can be transformed through search and content federation technologies into an altogether different kind of publication. Oftentimes I talk these days about search technologies being similar to datafeed technologies, but in this instance it's important to recognize that search technologies are also end-publishing technologies in and of themselves that can aggregate, filter and organize content in altogether new ways that enhance the value of one or more core publications. Using free content from Wikipedia and Freebase the Powerset technology does a good job of demonstrating this concept simply, albeit with some early growing pains. Publishers wanting to stay in the forefront of content markets are turning in droves to content federation technologies as a solution to add value to existing product sets, so expect to hear more from technologies such as Powerset that help publishers to add value rapidly.

Labels: content federation, federated search, Freebase, powerset, search, Wikipedia

The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the marketplace. As enterprises today face an explosion of internal and external content sources that they need to integrate to create insightful content services there is a huge gap that has arisen between what most content platforms can do to unify that information and what enterprises really need. This is particularly true in enterprise search, where many search services fail to provide access to all of the sources that a person typically needs to access.

Federated search solutions have been one route to address this problem, querying interfaces to multiple searchable sources and assembling the results "on the fly" to yield a combined search result. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of the needed information into a single database or search index federated search enables content to live wherever it has to and to come together when needed via multiple queries into integrated search results. Some do this better than others, and some have been at it for longer than others. MuseGlobal falls into both camps pretty handily, having been providing federated content solutions for more than a decade which has allowed them to hammer out an infrastructure that will pull together thousands of different types of content sources together via federated queries.

All well and good, but the question is, how do you make this sing in the eyes of enterprise users? MuseGlobal's support of Adhere Solutions, a company that includes Googlephile Steven Arnold's son Erik Arnold as a Director, points towards a very powerful possible answer to that question: the Google Search Appliance. While the GSA is a popular search tool in many major enterprises it's not been deemed the "go-to" search interface when it somes to getting all the right content from the right places all in one place in many instances. Federated content capabilities from MuseGlobal united with the GSA seem to fill that gap very handily. Capable of searching any number of search engines, internal and subscription databases and feeds as well as harvesting content via its own site crawlers, the MuseGlobal platform turns GSA into a clearing house for all of the content sources than an enterprise user might want - all delivered on the highly popular Google interface that provides access to Web content as well.

Combine this with both Google's programming interfaces for applications development and MuseGlobal's own extensive library of content integration tools and all of a sudden the GSA looks like a lot more beefy competitor for expanded use within the enterprise. And since the MuseGlobal library of source connectors includes many interfaces to subscription content services as well it's a platform that can put subscription database providers on a new footing with their users as well. All of a suddent the GSA looks less like a user-friendly also-ran and a lot more like a growing hub for enterprise and online content resources.

We hear lots of talk about workflow as the key solution that's going to enable value-add enterprise content services to build new revenues, but the ability to pull together a comprehensive set of sources that their customers' users really need to do the job is a slow and laborious process oftentimes for many subscription database providers to accomplish. At the same time enterprise portal providers are stymied oftentimes by users who refuse to use their solutions to any great degree because they're used to getting the answers they want from the search engines they rely upon as ther real "go-to" workflow solutions. The All Access Connector solution offered by Access Solutions and MuseGlobal offer both camps a lot to think about as they ponder how best to ensure that they are delivering the content that their users want in the applications that drive their productivity the most. The era of The New Aggregation's ability to deliver more content value from more content sources more rapidly than ever is upon us in full, indeed.

Labels: access solutions, enterprise, federated content, federated search, Google, museglobal, search