Knowledge Management

Every day we are overloaded with information and it gets more and more difficult to find the right sources, understand them, sort out a vast amount of information and select only those that we really need. Usually we do not need or want more information, but we are looking for better information, at the right time and in the right structure and the right context. This is why the demand for ´tailor-made information´ constantly grows and will continue growing. This information is essential for the support of knowledge management. Information about competitors, knowledge databases and archives, search engines, intelligent search and automated information call centers are some examples of modern way of using knowledge systems in practice. And these are exactly the services and applications Telefónica O2 Business Solutions offers, naming them INFORMATION REFINERY based on the basis of universal ONTOLOGY.

Multilingualsolution, whose development took over 10 years, is constantly checked in practical applications. This solution is based on the use of explicit and statistical methods of linguistics. Due to its structure, such applications are present, which are able to analyze and sort out a wide array of multilingual information contained in both open and closed resources. These applications help users on daily basis and serve for a systematic and targeted growth of knowledge.

Aims following from the use of Information refinery

• create a business portal of new generation based on the following slogan – “individual ana tailor-made information, data and news for everyone”,
• create a unified solution of individual selection and distribution of information according to personal profile and work profile of the user,
• ensure search and processing of necessary information,
• create information archive containing necessary news, documents and information and ensure its automated content filling,
• automate information search and distribution based on individual user needs.

Benefits of information refinery

• support of operational and strategic decision-making,
• improvement in user awareness in relation to strategy of knowledge management,
• increase the effectiveness of law execution and employee responsibilities,
• increase the effectiveness of work processes,
• Increase the quality of intra-company cooperation and team cooperation,
• support of modern form of personal growth,
• increase the effectiveness of collecting, sharing and evaluation information.

What is information refinery?

Information refinery is a complex solution of monitoring, collecting, analyzing and evaluating information sources, which ensure automated filling of the archive with information content and distribution of individualized information to the user. Due to the open architecture of the solution, the information source can basically be any un-structured or structured data element (e.g. news, article, document from the Internet, from the information archive, from public and private databases, etc.). Modular solution is created from several components, which can be divided into three layers – see picture.

Information portal

Presents the highest level of solution.

Portalensures presentation of information from the archive and monitoring of information sources to all users. The portal contains all usual and expected functions (personalization, access management, creation of Extranet/Intranet etc.).

Archive service allows for the creation of structured archive and set parameters of automated filling of the archive with content (selection of sources, selection of web servers, setting up of threshold values of automated calculation of the relevance of information sources against categories, etc.)

The service of knowledge management contains a set of applications, such as:

• expert search engines based on the principal of contextual analysis of data and multi-level associated multi-lingual thesaurus and dictionaries (new generation of search engines),
• individualized personalized e-magazine: by making a selection of topics of special-interest and professional topics, the user defines this “own” content of the news. The application automatically monitors information resources and subsequently processes and distributes the “personalized” newspapers in the form of periodic literature search (daily/weekly/monthly) to the specific users,
• group, company e-magazine: company version of the above solution,
• news about competitors: is a solution monitoring the relationship between the company and media, alternatively monitoring the actions of the competitors,
• comparison of offers, demands, or texts for that matter:ensures automated search component, which mostly corresponds with the needs of the client,
• information call-center: is a solution of automated answers to client requests or to the employees of the company.

The core of information refinery and Ontology

Ontology is the core component of the entire solution. It concerns a hierarchical structure of objects placed into a knowledge tree. This helps in analyzing the connections and links between individual objects and analyze data sources from the content side of things.

This component provides the solution with the following unique characteristics:

• the ability of multi-lingual processing,
• the ability of research in semantic environment and the use of object correlation,
• the ability of using accidents in a variety of languages,
• the ability to identify compound terms.

The core of information refinery ensures the monitoring of information sources, downloading of objective documents into archive (function “spider”), normalization of information sources (data, articles, documents), automated categorization and organizing of articles into archive (half-automated or fully automated) and other analytical functions (search or similarities, creation of extended indexes).