Thoughts from an Industry Leader: Margie Hlava, Access Innovations
August 4, 2011
Here are some astute observations on the direction of enterprise search from someone who knows what she’s talking about. Library Technology Guides points to an interview with Margie Hlava, president of Access Innovations, in “Access Innovations founder and industry pioneer talks about trends in taxonomy and search.”
Ms Hlava’s 33 years in the search industry informed her observations on current trends, three of which she sees as significant: Cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) computing, term mining, and the demand for metadata.
The move to the Cloud and SaaS computing demands more of our hardware, not less, Hlava insists. In particular, broadband networks are struggling to keep up. One advantage of the shift is a declining need to navigate labyrinths of hardware, software, and even internal politics on the client side. Other pluses are the motion toward increased data sharing and service enhancement. Also, more ways to maintain security and intellectual property rights are on the horizon.
She says that term mining is “a process involving conceptual extraction using thesaurus terms and their synonyms with a rule-base, then looking for occurrences to create more detailed data maps,” according to Hlava. Her company leverages this concept to make the most of clients’ large data sets. She is interested in new angles like mashups, data fusion, visualization, linked data, and personalization, but with a caveat: success in all these depends on the quality of the data itself. “Rotten data gives rotten results.”
Ms. Hlava regards taxonomies and other metadata enrichment as the way to bring efficiency to our searches. In that realm, the benefits have only begun:
“In terms of taxonomies and search, ‘I think we have just scratched the surface. With good data, our clients are in a good position to do an incredible array of new and interesting things. Good taxonomies take everything to the next level, forming the basis of not only mashups, but also author networks, project collaborations, deeper and better information retrieval,’ she concluded.”
Wise words from a wise woman. We look forward to observing these predictions take shape as the search industry moves forward. The interview with Margie Hlava, can be read in full here.
Access Innovations offers a wide range of content management services. The company has been building its semantic-based solutions for over thirty years and prides itself on its unique tool set and experienced personnel.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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