Flattening Enterprise Knowledge

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Flattening Enterprise Knowledge White Paper

Do you Control Your Content or Does Your Content Control You?

1 Executive Summary: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a common buzz term and every IT manager knows it’s an

organizational need. What is generally forgotten though is that ECM is more than just putting content

on a server.

Content drives the daily operations of an enterprise. If it didn’t there wouldn’t be a need for content

and information could be regularly discarded. Unfortunately that’s not realistic; discarding this

information creates liability, drives up costs and increases the likelihood for duplicity of information and

processes.

Enterprises create content through daily operations and associated tasks, so ECM offerings must have

the ability to not only meet basic storage needs but also function within the framework of various

standard operating procedures (SOPs). This makes selecting the right ECM far more critical than just

picking the right server to store your information on…

2 Issues

Enterprises operate as well as their content allows Do you control your content or does your content control you? Enterprises can consist of one office in a

small town or hundreds of offices across the globe. Offices have hundreds if not, thousands, of

employees and customers. Each employee and customer has associated data (HR Records, client

relationship information, invoice information, payroll information…). This data isn’t all in the same

language or file cabinet or shared drive or office or repository. That’s billions of words and images, a

successful enterprise needs to be able to locate, track and analyze at the blink of an eye.

Space Costs Money Daily enterprise operations create content. Content Requires Space. Whether content is the creation of

common forms, emails, corporate documents, specific hard copy materials (architectural drawings),

media or web pages, it requires space. Space could be a dark closet in the basement of your office or

it could be the file server space on your enterprise’s network.

Various SOPs Within each enterprise and subsequent office there are multiple

departments from business development to IT to HR. Each of these

departments use their own unique SOPs which create information and

content. Not only do these SOPs create massive amounts of information

and content, but they also require very specific processes for corporate,

legal, and trade compliance. This requires any ECM to have the flexibility

to implement multiple SOPs while having the ability to edit on the fly.

Paper Based SOPs By nature, enterprises create content for records management and daily

operations reactive to workflows and SOPs. This content is crucial to the

processes and operations. SOPs vary across enterprises from business

development and HR requirements to IT documentation. Each division or

branch of enterprise requires its own flexible SOP for content and daily

operations creating an ever growing collection of paper based workflows.

Discovery Enterprise operations require leveraging information in a timely and efficient manner. But the more

content created, the harder locating and examining this information becomes and the more

cumbersome enterprise content becomes. Increased time to convert data to knowledge discovery

creates inefficient processes and reduces return on information assets.

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Flattening Enterprise Knowledge White Paper

There’s only one solution capable of spanning all of an enterprise’s data

and information resources, finding drops of information in the sea of data,

and discovering the knowledge embedded within... KnowvationTM

3 Knowvation

Knowvation is a complete ECM platform for information intensive enterprises. Built on robust, field-

proven technology, Knowvation is designed for knowledge workers to reduce the time and cost of

finding information in the sea of data. Reduced time to convert data to knowledge discovery and

action improves business process efficiency and increases return on information assets.

While all portals, applications, or ECMs have some basic search and classification functionality, they are

typically limited to keyword search and manual classification. Furthermore, access to information in

these repositories is often stove-piped or out of context. With growing number of enterprise portals,

applications, and CMS on different platforms and databases, the need for unified, context relevant

access to information across all information resources is key to increasing productivity of knowledge

workers.

Knowvation can access information across all types of portals, applications, repositories, and file

systems. It can utilize a variety of indexing, concept and entity extraction, and content filtering methods

regardless of content type – unstructured, semi-structured, and structured. Knowvation’s unique

Information Discovery Services such as Boolean, Concept, and Pattern Searching provide context-

relevant, precise, and unified information retrieval.

Flatten your enterprise knowledge and take control of your content!

Semantic Indexing The unification of content begins in Knowvation’s initial semantic index process, which is based on

terms, expressions and concepts. Compared to simply ranking the frequency of words for indexing,

Knowvation initiates a semantic analysis to discover synonyms and related concepts embedded

throughout the entire collection of content. This provides the ability to execute searches on keyword

relations and phrases in a timely and effective process.

Categorization and Classification with Taxonomies Knowvation’s Categorizer automatically extracts concepts from documents using taxonomies and

creates a semantic signature (metadata) for each document. Taxonomies contain thousands of

concepts organized in consistent hierarchies with generic to specific relationships. This component

provides the knowledge foundation going forward as new data is discovered, modified or added, and

will automatically refresh the overall data repository to ensure the latest version to the user base.

Knowvation uses scalable and consistent taxonomies for categorization and flexible and pragmatic

classifications for information access. This unique approach provides users with fast and secure access

to relevant information in a portal like user interface – bringing context to content.

Categorization and Dynamic Classification represent a behavioral and technological leap for users and

enterprises alike. Rather than being forced to fit searches within the constraints of inflexible categories,

users can dynamically create their own information categories based on the context of their search.

Further, those categories can inter-relate and display information from widely disparate sources and

locations, permitting users to discover knowledge that might have otherwise remained hidden.

Optimized Search Precision & Recall Through the combination of keyword indexing, advanced linguistics processing, and variety of basic

and advanced search methods, Knowvation achieves optimized precision & recall across vast and

diverse information sources. Boolean, Pattern, and Concept modes can be used independently or

interactively.

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Flattening Enterprise Knowledge White Paper

Pattern Search Pattern searches tolerate spelling errors in either the body of the text or the keyword search. It

automatically performs pattern expansion on all keywords based the number of words set by the user,

and then ranks the retrieved documents. Pattern searching overcomes already stated deficiencies in

OCR quality.

Concept Search This type of search expands your search term to include semantically related terms. It uses a network of

word associations enabling the expansion of search terms by using variations, synonyms, antonyms, and

other relationships to search the entire document text. This allows users to have the most relevant

documents delivered to the top of the result list.

Intelligent Browse Structure This functionality allows administrators to create a rich hierarchical structure to organize archived

documents. This web-based navigation tool allows users to walk through a folder structure to retrieve

content. Browse can be invoked from a search result screen to allow users to quickly find documents

related to their searches that may not contain any of the desired search terms.

Advanced Language Processing –

Adding Value to Multi-lingual Content Ability to process content consistently even if

documents may be in different languages and

encoding requires advanced language

processing. Knowvation offers Advanced

Natural Language Processing features that

include Language Identification, Tokenization,

Morphology Analysis, Idiom Processing, Part-of-

Speech Tagging. Furthermore, Knowvation uses

Special Data Preparation features such as

Character Normalization, Stop-word Removal,

and Exact Phrase Identification.

Knowvation’s advanced language processing features enables content to be indexed, and

categorized with linguistic markers such as language tags, conceptual identifiers, grammatical

categories (i.e. is the term a noun or a verb). This allows for more accurate retrieval of results.

Web Editor Performs necessary maintenance, editing, and cataloging as well as manages metadata associated

with digital documents from both hard copy source materials to electronically published materials. The

web editor allows privileged users to create and edit descriptive metadata right from the search results

without loading a client application or installing an ActiveX control

Scalable Architecture Knowvation’s scalable multi-tier J2EE architecture is built for consistent and fast response time over local

and wide area networks. The design supports a distributed system configuration that can be tuned to

maintain performance regardless of size. The default web based client is implemented with JSP and

Servlet technology allowing for simple customization and web integration.

Cross Lingual Searching

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Flattening Enterprise Knowledge White Paper

Technical Design The core of the Knowvation design is

the underlying database structure

that defines the fundamental

relationship of the digital document

to its descriptive metadata. The

Dublin Core standard is used to

describe the metadata of the

document represented as XML and

stored in the database schema. A

best-of-breed full-text search engine

is pre-configured to index and

retrieve documents from the digital

archive based on full text and

metadata queries against the

complete data repository. For added

flexibility, the Dublin Core metadata

framework can be expanded to

accommodate an additional 50

customer-defined fields.

Business services implemented as

Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) provide

extensible APIs for content

management, access and

administration. These data objects

provide full lifecycle management of

digital documents in the archive.

Role based security wraps the entire

system providing granular levels of

access to the business objects and

the documents themselves that can be tightly controlled by system administrators. The extensible

security model can be configured to use LDAP for authentication and directory services, allowing

existing enterprise policies to be migrated to the digital archive.

Application Programming Interface A complete API exposes all system functionality to facilitate

customization and integration of Knowvation with 3rd party and

legacy enterprise applications. Communication with the

backend Enterprise Java Beans is done via RMI and JNDI over

HTTP/SSL, allowing any Java application either local or remote

access to system functionality. Knowvation can be installed as a

complete turnkey application. Knowvation can also be

customized and integrated with other third party technologies

such as document capture, forms processing, workflow, and

document management systems using Knowvation’s powerful

API services.

Knowvation API

Knowvation Architecture

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Flattening Enterprise Knowledge White Paper

Document Version Control and

Security Knowvation incorporates full

Document Version Control and

Security. This feature can be

customized to set specific rights and

privileges to certain users and groups

in the modification, preservation and

identification of specified documents.

The level of custody, possession and

control of documents can be set by

the original author or other authorized

personnel.

As new authorized versions and provisions of a document are created, Knowvation automatically

preserves the original. Reports can be generated automatically detailing each version change

including; chain of custody identification, location, date of change and reasons. Additional reports

can also include the specifics on individual user’s history of searches, topics, specified sites and current

document custody status as illustrated in Knowvation Document History. Users can access the original

file by clicking the Restore option under the Version column.

MyWare Knowvation provides individual users the

ability to create their own preferences

through the MyWare functionality. Users have

the ability to save specific searches and

create notifications for new additions that

meet relevant search criteria. With MyWare,

users also have the ability to customize and

edit their layout and setup preferences in

addition to creating RSS feeds.

Speech to Text Manual transcription of audio can be very

expensive. To provide a more cost effective

solution, Knowvation provides its customers with

speech to text searching. Text is indexed for

search when the speech to text conversion

occurs. This allows rapid discovery across large

volumes of audio to include oral histories,

congressional proceedings, official audio

recordings and signals intelligence. Commonly

audio supported files include .wav and .mp3.

As displayed in the figure to the right users can

search full text of converted audio using all

Knowvation’s full search feature set. Selection of

highlighted “hit” plays audio at that selection.

Knowvation Speech to Text

Functionality

Knowvation Record History

Knowvation MyWare Functionality

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Flattening Enterprise Knowledge White Paper

Flexible Displays Knowvation’s unique Graphical User Interface (GUI) provides users the ability to quickly change screen

displays to meet their preferences. This GUI flexibility allows users to toggle back and forth between

different displays while maintaining search results or the file currently being viewed. Below are a few

examples. The first screenshots show the column and row views for search results. The 3rd screenshot

displays the quick toggle to the metadata portion of a file.

About PTFS

With more than 500 partnerships and installations for clients internationally, PTFS offers

customized and proven content management solutions. Our core products include

KnowvationTM, BibliovationTM and DronewareTM. To help organizations focus on their

core missions, we also offer highly technical teams that streamline the process to

implement and maintain custom solutions that best meet their needs.

Knowvation Search Result

Column View

Knowvation Search Result

Row View

Knowvation Metadata Editor

Interface