When Vivisimo began looking for a fresh take for the annual update to its enterprise search engine Velocity, developers decided to study the employees using it on their intranets every day. They found that workers were used to Google searches, del.icio.us tagging, and Web 2.0 interactivity they experienced in their home computing, and they weren't happy about trading in the simplicity and speed of consumer search when they went to work. "It was a user rebellion," reported Rebecca Thompson, Vivisimo's VP of marketing.

Velocity, Vivisimo's flagship product, was built on a search philosophy that distinguishes it from the enterprise search platform pack. Its engines cluster results based on keyword comprehension and built on mathematical algorithms and language patterns. Each update sticks to the cluster concept but takes advantage of burgeoning technologies to keep high-profile clients, like Procter and Gamble, the United States Department of Defense, and Eli Lilly and Co., able to tap into their massive digital assets. Recent versions 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5 respectively scaled search interfaces, made the platform compatible across a number of operating systems, and brought search capabilities to users' mobile devices. Version 6.0 gives users better control over how results are clustered and sorted, and it also adds an innovative twist with what Thompson calls "a first in the industry--collaborative functionality."

With cues from consumer sites like Amazon, Flickr, and del.icio.us, Velocity 6.0 invites users to feed information into and collaborate directly across the search interface, cutting out the middle step between discovering and sharing. "It's a web world," says Thompson, "and the enterprise software space, from a user-experience perspective, seems to be a little behind." To catch up, Velocity 6.0 adds trendy extras like tagging, rating, ranking, and commenting functions to allow users a greater degree of interaction with the assets and each other without having to leave the Velocity portal.

Velocity 6.0's rating system allows users to help fellow searchers find what they need by ranking results for certain keywords. The same idea--users helping fellow users--inspired a tagging feature, which gives seekers the option to contribute their own tags for enhanced findability beyond original metadata. Notes and comments can be added right into the search interface and, for greater on-the-fly sharing, users can deposit results into virtual folders as they're retrieved. "Normally, you'd use the enterprise search engine to find all those results, then cut and paste your links into an email and attach it to documents, taking up more and more space on the exchange server," explains Thompson. "But this created an information glut problem." In already overstuffed corporate intranets, Velocity hopes to keep search-based collaboration neatly contained within the search space. "This is the way, without ever having to leave the system, to save and share that information with colleagues," says Thompson.

Customers told Vivisimo that they wanted their search product to be less of an engine and more of a portal. Through that portal, the updated Velocity now searches and stores information from across all the multiple content management systems its clients employ, from email and individual desktops to archived repositories in remote branches. But as much as clients need to find the right digital asset, Velocity thinks they need help finding the right people for their projects. They've added a social networking function that includes self-written bios, lists of projects and recent searches, and updated contact information to alert co-workers to the possibility of collaboration before it happens. To squeeze even more value out of the search process, Velocity 6.0 introduces a big-picture feature that gives executives and leaders a way to calculate and visualize search trends across their whole team. "We provide managers the ability to see a visual map of hot topics within their groups, departments, or across an entire organization," says Thompson. "It's a visual dashboard of the tags and commentary."

If you looked at Vivisimo's visual search map over the last six months, Thomson says "it would be all about tagging, organizing, and social networking." However, Velocity 6.0 also includes tweaks to its core technology, clustering. If the initial request doesn't hit the right search spot, users can hit a button that "remixes" the results, sifting through keywords for a more relevant hit. "Right now, Velocity pulls out common themes," said Thompson. "But when you hit the button that says 'different,' it's going to remix those and pull out submerged themes."

With conflicting search experiences in and outside the firewall, the enterprise search rebellion is on. Yet, with Web 2.0-inspired features and value added onto every office search, Vivisimo wants users to know it's on their side.

(www.vivisimo.com)

Teragram has unveiled Semantic Term Manager (STM) 2.0, software that enables management of content and maintenance of ontologies in enterprise content repositories and databases. STM 2.0 is designed to help corporate librarians maintain ontologies and integrate this information directly with Teragram’s TK240 taxonomy management tool. The combination of these two programs allows knowledge workers to maintain metadata across repositories and databases and to automatically tag documents according to the defined taxonomies. These tools help to simplify the enterprise search and retrieval process, says the company.

Teragram cites STM 2.0's ability to maintain information in different authority lists in the enterprise and build relationships between them. For instance, the company reports, a corporate librarian could easily manage relationships between terms in the sales lead database (i.e. primary contacts, companies and locations) and cross-reference this with a list of internal salespeople and their territories. Further, Teragram explains, STM 2.0 creates a uniform approach to tagging content across different divisions in a large company. For example, Teragram suggests, if a pharmaceutical development lab maintains a database of drugs, diseases and side effects, several research scientists can log in to make changes to the database. An administrator approves or rejects these changes, allowing the information to be updated as it is generated by the people working in the field.

STM 2.0 works in tandem with Teragram’s TK240 taxonomy management program. Information stored in the STM 2.0 database can be exported to Teragram’s database management tool, TK240, to build complex taxonomies, which can be used to automatically categorize documents and to extract entities and events from documents.

Exalead has announced an OEM-specific version of its search software, Exalead: One 4.5 Enterprise. Designed for independent software providers (ISVs), the software is said to be easily embedded into their software applications to provide customers with unified information access to structured and unstructured data regardless of format or location.

The company emphasizes the following features of Exalead One: Enterprise 4.5 OEM Edition:

• extensive application programming interface (API) support;
• new APIs to enhance data retrieval, usability, creation of user interfaces and "push" capabilities;
• optimized performance, including support for 32- and 64-bit platforms (including multicore systems) across major operating systems and compliance with major operating systems;
• high scalability;
• limited search footprint;
• ease of installation;
• high degree of support (320 file formats and more than 54 languages); and
• ability to automatically adapt to an organization’s existing security policies.

Business Objects, a provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, announced the launch of BusinessObjects Polestar, a solution intended to bring together the simplicity and speed of search with the trust and analytical power of business intelligence in order to provide immediate answers. BusinessObjects Polestar users will be able to enter a few search keywords to find the most relevant information instantly from across all of their applications and data sources--with no previous reports or metrics required. Like internet search, Polestar will index the data stored in organizational sources for user search and exploration. Information workers are meant to benefit from this self-service discovery without needing to understand the data, where it is located, or how it is structured. BusinessObjects Polestar general availability is expected in December 2007.

(www.businessobjects.com)

Coveo Solutions Inc., a global provider of secure, enterprise search solutions, announced the availability of Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) 5.0, a commercially-viable enterprise search solution for complex data environments. The latest version of Coveo Enterprise offers new benefits: distributed indexing capabilities; more free connectors; real-time ranking; enhanced SharePoint functionality; audio-video search in multiple languages; and secure interoperability.

(www.coveo.com)

Scitopia.org, a free, federated search portal created by science and technology societies, removed its beta label, marking the official launch of its service. The scitopia.org beta was opened in June, allowing users to test the site. During that time, libraries around the world--including the Library of Congress, Stanford University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and libraries in Australia, Ireland and Italy--have included links to scitopia.org from their websites so patrons could use the service during its development. During the beta phase, scitopia.org's cross-file searching was refined, in an attempt to increase the precision and consistency of keyword and author searches. The interface was modified according to user feedback, aligning the language and layout with searchers' expectations. The scitopia.org interface, developed by Deep Web Technologies, includes both simple and advanced search options, which allow users to find articles by title or author name, or conduct a keyword search.

(www.scitopia.org)

For more information, please see ITI's NewsBreaks: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=39927

Organizing your online life just got a little easier. Launched on Oct. 30, Eluma 2.0 is a new personal web organization tool designed to aid personal productivity. Founders Richard Buck and Paul Christen created Eluma with one goal in mind: to combine the various elements of personal productivity and then marry these elements with various search features.

Eluma is an end-user desktop application that allows users to collect and share online content. Similar to del.icio.us, a tool that stores bookmarks, Eluma users can create and share collections of web content with customer communities. Unlike del.icio.us, however, Eluma users' collections go beyond bookmarks to include RSS feeds, Flash content, podcasts, and video. Says Joe Lichtenberg, Eluma's VP of business development, "I subscribe to feeds, I collect bookmarks and podcasts, and all of these things combined make up who I am on Eluma."

Personal collections, once organized, can remain personal (solely for the collector) or be made public and available to anyone. Those made public can then augment others' searches.  

For instance, before shelling out $2,500 for a plasma television, most do a bit of research. Eluma allows users to gather and store the searches and information found most helpful into a collection that can then be shared with others who are also interested in buying a plasma television.

Social search is a hot topic and attracting an increasing number of traditional searchers. However, as Lichtenberg points out, scalability remains a major problem with social search.

Most people are not content creators. "Almost all users are lurkers," Lichtenberg says. While this is true, it is also true that most users have favorites, bookmarks, and go-to sites they rely on to meet their needs. With this new product, Eluma is trying to cut out the middle man by allowing private searches and their results to go public if an Eluma user so chooses.

Traditional web search engines can be limiting and tedious. If you were to Google "Bruce Springsteen," for example, the top results are fairly static. On Eluma, top results are constantly in flux, as they are rated by other users. A Bruce Springsteen collection gathers all of the best hits as determined by another Eluma user, complete with website summaries written by the collection's creator. Eluma presents the searcher with algorithmic search results, along with social search results.

However, an issue that arises with social search solutions is evaluating the quality of others' collections. Eluma users can tag, rate, and comment on collections, and collections with the highest ratings and most positive feedback are the most prominent.

Furthermore, Eluma employs tools that plug into a browser. If a lot of people visit a certain site, that collection rises to the top. "We put the tools in place so that the community can be self-policing," Lichtenberg says. "Sites like Wikipedia don't police their contributors, and that's the risk."

Whether or not social search will prevail as the most effective approach to finding information remains to be seen. What is clear, though, says Lichtenberg: "The read/write dynamic is being included into all elements of the web, and that's what search is on the brink of. We at Eluma just want to put control back into the hands of the users."

(www.eluma.com)  

Adverb Media announced that RelevantNoise, a technology company dedicated to mining social media for business intelligence, is launching a new version of its Sonar dashboard. Sonar is a web-based technology that allows users to uncover intelligence from social media (such as blogs, message boards, and online communities), enabling them to understand the "conversations" around their brands in order to discover opportunities, avert potential disaster, and measure the level of engagement across audiences. The new version of Sonar is a user-driven tool that gives clients a real-time, 360-degree view of the user-generated content around their brand. The technology delivers the data in an easy-to-read format that includes both eye-friendly charts and quick access to actual blog posts and other text.

(www.adverbmedia.com, www.relevantnoise.com)

Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has announced enhancements to Ulrichsweb.com and Ulrich's Serials Analysis System. The service updates, designed to enhance functionality and increase usability, are the largest in 18 months. The service has enhanced its comprehensive serials discovery through the addition of A&I databases to Ulrichsweb.com records displays, updated links for the 2006 Science and Social Science Impact Factor journals, and refreshed connections between Ulrichsweb.com and JCR web accounts that facilitate linking at the journal level. As part of the October 2007 release, there is a new look for Ulrichsweb.com, the first update to the site in years.

Further, Serials Solutions also announced the availability of the first authorized federated search connection to HeinOnline via 360 Search, Serials Solutions' federated search service. A legal database, HeinOnline spans multiple collections and provides access to tens of millions of pages of research material.

(www.proquest.com, www.serialssolutions.com)

ISYS Search Software has announced the availability of an adapter to enable customers of EMC's Documentum Enterprise Content Integration Services (ECI Services) to access data indexed by ISYS:web and to federate ISYS:web’s search results.

ECI Services is a federation engine that processes and distributes queries to corporate content already indexed by various third-party search tools; it then normalizes and displays the consolidated results. This level of functionality provides users with a comprehensive access point to search all of a corporation’s content repositories from a single window.

Vital Path, which is known for its content integration solutions, has extended the capabilities of its flagship offering, PathBuilder, to include "in-place" records management and content virtualization. The company reports the new features allow organizations to continue to manage content at the line of business and departmental level while managing records at the enterprise level, thereby leveraging current IT investment and legacy systems.

Vital Path describes PathBuilder as an out-of-the-box content integration product, specifically for unstructured content, that helps companies integrate diverse content repositories by providing a gateway to the various ECM applications. The company adds that Vital Path’s PathBuilder enables organizations to expose content stored in other repositories to Open Text’s Livelink ECM – Records Management. Using bi-directional communications, PathBuilder enables federated activities in the enterprise, such as search, e-discovery and in-place records management.

Content virtualization (also referred to as short cuts, referencing or stubs) allows users in Open Text systems access to content in a different system, without leaving the "home" system. PathBuilder creates an icon in a convenient location in Livelink ECM that links to content in a remote repository. Once created, references look and feel like any other Livelink ECM content.

Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, and a provider of customizable electronic research information for the medical, healthcare, and academic markets, announced the release of OvidSP, its new electronic information search platform. OvidSP is the next of Ovid's two existing platforms, Ovid Web Gateway and SilverPlatter WEBSPIRS, and is intended to make searching high-quality scholarly and professional content faster, simpler, and more efficient for all users. All Ovid customers will be able to access the new platform beginning immediately. OvidSP is designed to streamline the search and discovery process with a simple interface, precision search technology, and user workflow tools.

(www.wolterskluwer.com, www.ovid.com)
 

InQuira, Inc., a provider of integrated software applications for intelligent search, knowledge management, analytics, and user experience, announced that Serena Software, an independent software company, will be implementing the InQuira Customer Experience Platform to power its search and knowledge management (KM) initiatives. Serena is leveraging InQuira Information Manager in an attempt to enhance its knowledge base, and InQuira Intelligent Search to make the knowledge base accessible by both support professionals and customers using Serena's web self-service capabilities.

(www.serena.com, www.inquira.com)