The Problem

Keyword search is very effective for finding specific information and facts. However, for exploratory searches in which users need to research and learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. This type of search is used to generate information and knowledge about topics not specifically defined and often evolving over time – such as learning about a company, trend, industry, technology or market. These types of searches often start without specific knowledge or even enough contextual information to form a specific useful query. Exploratory searches require research, browsing, connecting information and discovery of new and diverse information, which is time consuming.

Solution

Innovative Query’s IQeXplore product is an integrated web service to support and enhance complex exploratory research. This service can be deployed as an enterprise server license or as a SaaS. The application is totally browser based and is both powerful and easy to use. It integrates into users’ searches across space and time and allows them to capture relevant content from their existing search tools (Google, SharePoint, enterprise search, paid information services, Documentum, knowledge management systems, text files, etc.). IQeXplore automatically generates context analysis and linking of the information captured, storing it and correlating in its knowledgebase. From these discovered correlations visualization tools generate knowledge maps and trees to map relationships among researched information. Tools are provided for research and task management and team collaboration accelerate knowledge generation.

Business Need

Businesses are increasingly information intensive and innovation driven, putting increasing demands on knowledge workers and technologies to stay competitive. Information overload hinders the discovery of business intelligence information, as traditional tools often overload users with lists of often irrelevant information. Knowledge workers increasing work as teams, often spread all over the world and need to collaborate to perform their jobs and generate knowledge. There are interrelated problems that organizations and knowledge workers routinely struggle with in research and knowledge generation tasks. These are managing dispersed multidisciplinary teams of workers and improving researcher productivity with the increasing information overload we all face. 

As knowledge workers we all struggle to keep up with the ever increasing volumes of information, and information sources at our disposal. Executives, consultants and marketers in many industries are routinely tracking and evaluating industry trends and needs. They do primary market research by researching companies, industry trends, customer needs and reading research reports among other efforts. In product R&D efforts it is a constant effort to keep up with all the technical journals, web news, product announcements of competitors, customer feedback reports, product feature requests, new technologies, and industry companies. Biotechnology, information technology, materials technology, etc. researchers are constantly struggle to keep up with volumes of information available.

But, the biggest problem we face as knowledge workers is figuring out what information is valuable to our tasks, our businesses, now and in the future. There are few tools, other than brute effort in keeping up with this information and helping the knowledge worker relate and apply information to their tasks and understanding.

As the amount of information grows, productivity for knowledge workers tends to flatten out – we are in an era of exponential information growth. The ability of humans to process and use information is still the same – humans can only effectively hold and connect four pieces of information at a time. To help solve this problem we need tools, not just to organize, structure and search information, but to help people connect information in a usable and meaningful way. As about 80% of information is in unstructured sources, such as documents and web pages, information tools beyond document management and search are needed to help knowledge works to collect information from documents, do exploratory search, and find relationships and connect between information sources to create new knowledge and insight.

In the modern world globalization is increasing and innovation and rapid continuous change are major diving forces in many organizations. This is driving dispersed, even global, work forces where team work, work flow and collaboration are necessary for innovation and competitiveness. Discovering and creating new and relevant knowledge is the key to innovation and competitiveness.