The new generation of Internet search technology can also be applied to organize and retrieve information within a company’s Intranet. Therefore, companies that tag (label) and categorize their documents will have an advantage over those that overlook this practice.
Clare Hart, Executive Vice President of Dow Jones & Co. and President of the online information service Factiva, recounts the story of an employee who drafted a detailed plan to attract customers. After two weeks of focused research and development, he discovered that his project was sitting right on the company’s printer. “This situation occurs everywhere,” Hart asserts. “Tagging data descriptions is like a form of ‘copyright stamp’ from the author, while also preventing wasted time searching for files.”
Last week, IT experts participating in the global World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006) in Edinburgh, Scotland, also discussed the prospect of computers being able to interpret descriptions attached to data, subsequently creating intelligent connections between related files, thereby forming the Semantic Web.
This idea applies not only to the Internet but also to Intranets. However, businesses need to establish their own regulations to control documents and determine who can access files. Following that, individuals must categorize which information will be displayed through search keywords.
The online news service Factiva has employed an automatic tagging mechanism for 80% of the 5 million files they have collected. The data is categorized under headings such as company, industry, region, topic, and language. The remaining 20% of the information is still classified manually.
“To me, the Web 2.0 trend is simply understood as The Web will serve me, I do not want to serve the web. Spending several hours to find what I need is not what I expect,” Hart said.
T.N.
