Knowledge Management
Every day we face a flood of new information, and so for most of us it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the right sources amongst this information, to sort through the massive amount of data and choose only that data which we really need. Usually we neither need nor want further information, but primarily better information at the right time and in the right structure in the right context. For this reason there is currently an increase, and there will be a further increase in the future, in the demand for customised information which is crucial for supporting knowledge management. Competitive intelligence, knowledge databases and archives, research systems, intelligent searching and automated information call centres are examples of the modern method of application of knowledge systems in practice. And the company Telefónica O2 Business Solutions offers these services and applications with the name Information refinery based on universal Ontology.
Information refinery means a solution of knowledge management and analysis of information sources
The multilingual solution in development for more than 10 years is verified on an ongoing basis in practical applications, this solution is based on the use of explicit and statistical linguistic methods. As a result of its structure it contains applications which are capable of analysing and grading a large volume of multilingual information contained in open and closed sources. These applications help the users in day-to-day experience, and they serve for the systematic and targeted development of knowledge and awareness.
Aims of deployment of information refinery
- to create a corporate portal of the new generation based on the slogan “to each his own individual, customised news, data and information”,
- to create a unified solution for individual selection and distribution of information corresponding to the profile and working classification of a user,
- to ensure for users the seeking out and processing of the necessary information,
- to create an information archive containing the necessary reports, documents and information, and to ensure its automatic filling with content,
- to automate the ascertaining and distribution of information according to the individual needs of the users
Benefits of information refinery
- support for operative and strategic decision making,
- improvement in information level of users in compliance with the strategy of knowledge management,
- improvement in the exercise of rights and duties of employees,
- improving working processes,
- improving the quality of internal company cooperation and team cooperation,
- support for modern form of personal development,
- improving the effectiveness of processes for the collection, sharing and evaluation of information.
What the information refinery is
The information refinery is a comprehensive solution to the monitoring, collection, analysis and processing of information sources ensuring the automatic filling of the archive with information content and distribution of individualised information to the user. And as a result of the open architecture of the solution, virtually any unstructured or structured data element can be an information source (for example: report, article, document from internet, from information archive, from public and non-public databases etc.). The modular solution consists of several components which can be divided into three layers, as shown in the picture.
Information portal
It represents the highest layer of the solution:
The portal ensures the presentation of information from the archive and monitoring of information sources for all users. The portal contains all the usual and anticipated functions (personalisation, management of access, creation of extranet/intranet etc.).
The operator of the archive allows the creation of a structured archive and the configuration of parameters of automatic filling of the archive with content (selection of sources, selection of web servers, configuration of threshold values of automatic calculation of relevance of information sources in terms of categories etc.)
Services of knowledge management contain a set of applications, such as:
- expert search services based on the principle of context analysis of data and multi-level associated multi-lingual thesauruses and dictionaries (new generation of search services),
- individual personalised e-magazine: by the selection of interest and expert themes the user defines the content of its "personal" newspaper. The application automatically monitors the information sources and processes and distributes to users its "personal" newspaper in the form of periodical increment researches (daily, weekly or monthly),
- group, company e-magazine: company version of the aforementioned automatic research system,
- competing intelligence: is a solution of the relationship of the company with the media, or monitoring of activity of competition,
- comparison of supply and demand or of texts ensures the automatic searching of components which best correspond to the needs of clients,
- information call-centre: it is a solution to the automation of answers to questions of clients or employees of the company.
Core of information refinery and Ontology
Ontology is the key component of the entire solution. This is a hierarchical structure of objects arranged into a knowledge tree. As a result of this, it is possible to analyse the correlations and links between the individual objects and analyse the data sources from the content aspect.
As a result of this component, the solution is distinguished by the following unique properties:
- ability of multi-lingual processing,
- ability for searching in semantic surroundings and use of object correlation,
- ability of work with morphology in various languages,
- ability of identifying multi-word terms.
The core of the information refinery ensures the monitoring of information sources, downloading of the relevant documents to the archive (function "spider"), normalisation of information sources (data, articles, documents etc.), automatic categorisation and classification of articles in archive (semi automatic or fully automatic) and other analytical functions (searching for similarities, concordances, creation of expanded indexes).
