Office applications Toolkit

Give your users a better search tool

Tags:
Metadata,
Data

Mike Svatek, ZDNet.com ZDNet US

Published: 05 Nov 2002 13:44 GMT

"Dear Mike," began an email from a co-worker, "I'm trying to find the latest information on how we support ISO standards. Do you know where this information is located, and can you direct me to it?"

This is probably something you've heard before, and it seems like a no-brainer. But in all likelihood, it's not. Even if you were able to locate this information, it would probably take you just as long to find it as your inquisitive co-worker or anybody else in the company would. Why? Because all of you rely on the same, poorly tuned, ineffective search engines.

But, imagine for a moment, that the information you were looking for was easy to find. Searching on your intranet or extranet should be as simple as something you probably already take for granted: online banking. When you log on to your banking site, you can instantly view your account, and with a couple of clicks "magically" view everything you want or need to know about your account, including your balance, standing orders, and the last three checks you wrote. That's because your banking institution was kind enough to build a system that enables you to access the information you need at your fingertips. Why? Because your bank recognises the importance of delivering relevant, timely information to you, their valued customer, in the right context when you need it. Why? Because if they didn't, they would risk losing your business. For today's banks, personalised search is not an option; it's a requirement of doing business.

This leads us to the obvious question: Why then are our average, everyday search attempts so frustrating? The answer is more complicated than you may think.

To begin to unravel the conundrum, we need to understand the source of the problem better. Some pieces of information are easier to find than others because some content is structured, and some isn't. There are also different ways of data structuring that are more effective than others. Keep in mind that when we consider the vast expanse of information that exists in the world out there, our expectations are actually pretty high.

The reality is that search technologies must be able to decipher an extremely large amount of unstructured content, which may exist anywhere on any computer in the world, including our own laptops. Nevertheless, we, as users, expect immediate, accurate results when we type a simple question or keyword. When we take into account the complexity of this process, it's actually amazing that we are able to find anything. And in most instances, the content we're looking for has no information or metadata attached to it. In other words the search engine often has no way of knowing the origin of the information, who published it, what key topics it refers to or what its relationship is to other content. Clearly, the task of finding and delivering unstructured information is considerably more complicated than accessing our banking information.

This, in a nutshell, is why structure is so important. Once structure has been applied to content, the content can be searched more effectively. That's where metadata comes in. Metadata provides structure by acting as information tags that are applied to content. And a well-designed metadata framework is key to improving the performance and accuracy of search engines, not to mention all of the other delivery platforms, like portals, personalisation engines, syndication engines, and other content-rich applications.

An example of how metadata works: Say a sales manager for a large manufacturing company realises he needs to get a better handle on his customers. He logs on to the Web site of a software vendor and types "customer tracking software" in the search box. Although, the software vendor he is considering doesn't offer anything by this name, its metadata-driven search engine understands that this request is conceptually the same as a type of software that it does offer, customer relationship management (CRM), and provides him with a link to its CRM product section.

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