Concept Searching for SharePoint

July 9, 2008

My SharePoint posts continue to thrill the two or three readers of this Web log. So, here’s another joy booster. You can add taxonomy navigation, concept searching, and classification functions with a snap in from Concept Searching.

The company has offices in the UK (headquarters), spyland in McLean, Virginia, and Capetown, South Africa. The firm’s tag line is “Retrieval Just Got Smarter,” which sums up the company’s approach to content processing quite nicely, thank you. Founded in 2002, John Challis (CEO and CTO) want to develop statistical search and classification products with a difference. The idea was to provide a method that reduced the “drift” that afflicts some statistical methods. You can download a useful fact sheet here.

The SharePoint conceptClassifier, according to the “Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog”:

adds automatic document classification and taxonomy management to Microsoft SharePoint and works without the need to build another search index. It is installed as a set of Features that, when activated, cause new columns to be displayed in the document library listings and new menu options appear that allow authorized users to edit the automatically generated metadata, if required.

To see the system in action navigate to http://moss.conceptsearching.com. When you get to the demo screen, click on concept searching in the left hand panel. You will be able to explore a limited set of content. Some documents return 404 errors, but you will get the idea of the system’s functionality.

Among the features the system adds to SharePoint are:

Automatic Classification
Controlled Vocabulary
Multiple Taxonomies
Folksonomies
Auto Clue suggestion
AJAX Environment
Document Movement
SQL Based

This is an impressive line up, and you will want to test the system to make sure it meets your needs. The company, like Interse in Copenhagen, recognizes the appetite SharePoint administrators have for features that make the system more useful to SharePoint users, which number somewhere between 65 and 100 million worldwide.

Stephen Arnold, July 9, 2008

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Enterprise, Microsoft, News, Search, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.