Improving Collaboration Using AI-based Tools: Bringing in Outside Knowledge, Improving Internal & External Search, Improving Collaboration
The goal of this session was to provide three views on how organizations are using more advanced technologies (artificial intelligence) to do new things with search and collaboration. Cary Pearlman from Entopia discussed how their product intelligently combines content, metadata, context and collaboration into their tools. Richard Emsley of Exago talked about how their products, which came out of British Telecom intellectual property, help bring Knowledge to People and deliver Knowledge through People. Interestingly, one of Exago's products summarizes large bodies of information (long documents, collections) to help people get an idea of what they have found without having to read it themselves. While Exago and Entopia cover similar ground, there are enough differences that they are collaborating on a project with The Chalfont Project.
Luc Dodinval of Allstate (and whom I know from KMPro Chicago) talked about the general ideas of applying advanced technology to KM problems. Some of his discussion focused more on features that need to exist in KM products to help people have more trust in them. Examples include the ability to show the "freshness" of material found through the KM system. Even better would be something that tied materials together, so we can see changes to information that is used in a number of other locations.
The other interesting idea he mentioned is that search tools should give people an idea of whether they've done an exhaustive search or whether they have just scratched the surface. This ties back, I think, to the Entopia and Exago discussion of adding context to search in the attempt to bring more relevance to the results. Also with search, we know that information "out there" continually changes. A number of tools let you store searches to see what is new. They should also allow you to store the search results, so you can get what you saw before.