BA Insight: More Auto Classification for SharePoint

April 30, 2015

I thought automatic indexing and classifying of content was a slam dunk. One could download Elastic and Carrot2 or just use Microsoft’s tools to whip up a way to put accounting tags on accounting documents, and planning on strategic management documents.

There are a number of SharePoint centric “automated solutions” available, and now there is one more.

I noticed on the BA Insight Web site this page:

There was some rah rah in US and Australian publications. But the big point is that either SharePoint administrators have a problem that existing solutions cannot solve or the competitors’ solutions don’t work particularly well.

My hunch is that automatic indexing and classifying in a wonky SharePoint set up is a challenge. The indexing can be done by humans and be terrible. Alternatively, the tagging can be done by an automated system and be terrible.

The issues range from entity resolution (remember the different spellings of Al Qaeda) to “drift.” In my lingo, “drift” means that the starting point for automated indexing just wanders as more content flows through the system and the administrator does not provide the time consuming and often expensive tweaking to get the indexing back on track.

There are smarter systems than some of those marketed to the struggling SharePoint licensees. I profile a number of NGIA systems in my new monograph CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access.

The SharePoint folks are not featured in my study because the demands of real time, multi lingual, real time content processing do not work with solutions from more traditional vendors.

On any given day, I am asked to sit through Webinars about concepts, semantics, and classification. If these solutions worked, the market for SharePoint add in would begin to coalesce.

So far, dealing with the exciting world of SharePoint content processing remains a work very much in progress.

Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2015

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Indexing, News, SharePoint

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

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.