InformationWeek

November 17, 1997

Straight Line To Relevant Data

Customized content should slash intranet search time

ntranets keep information from users.

That's what many of IT managers are discovering. One in five managers among the 1,300 worldwide polled by Reuters Business Information say they believe employees waste vast amounts of time searching for information on the Internet, corporate networks, and intranets. Among these managers, 80% cited the crush of internal communications, including intranets, as a principal reason for information overload.

"We have deluged people with an enormous amount of information, but we haven't figured out how to help people make better sense of that information," says Bipin Junarkar, director of knowledge management at Monsanto Corp., the $41 billion St. Louis manufacturer of the agricultural chemical Roundup, the artificial sweetener Nutrasweet, birth-control pills, and other products.

Next-Generation In tranets
To harness this vast amount of data, IT managers are looking ahead to technologies that will give each intranet user relevant, customized content. Companies are planning the next generation of intranets around technologies that offer intelligent agents, collaborative filtering, search and retrieval, and push delivery-all of which promise to slash search times for and boost access to needed information.

Vendors are responding to these demands by refining the technologies in products scheduled to ship over the next year. But which products will truly deliver results remains to be seen.

New York consulting firm Ernst & Young LLP, with $2.5 billion in sales last year and 30,000 employees worldwide, uses personalization extensively on its intranet. The intranet is based on the Search 97 search engine from Verity Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can search more than 200 types of documents stored in repositories such as Lotus Domino, Open Database Connectivity-compliant databases, and documen t-management systems.Users at Ernst & Young have set up profiling agents on the system by specifying words and phrases they regularly search for. Thesearch engine repeats the searches according to an hourly schedule set up by a systems administrator and notifies users of new matching content via E-mail, push technology, and personal Web pages.

Ernst & Young also uses profiling agents from news services, such as Knight-Ridder's. These let users specify the types of stories they receive from news feeds. But the firm has had mixed success using multiple agents, says John Peetz, Ernst & Young's chief knowledge officer. "We need vendors to standardize on one application interface," he explains.

Ernst & Young wants to use one agent-preferably from Verity-to filter all its news feeds. But the news services don't offer a standard application programming interface to integrate their feeds with other vendors' agents, Peetz says.

Seeking Simplicity
To simplify delivery of filtered content, Ernst & Young is testing BackWeb push technology from BackWeb Technologies Inc. in San Jose, Calif. BackWeb filters content and allows further filtering through profiles on the client side and rules on the server side. When users subscribe to a BackWeb chan- nel, they create a profile that includes their interests, their position in the company, and other variables. An administrator configures a channel on the server to send specific content only to users who fit a specific profile.

The next release of BackWeb, as yet unannounced, will reportedly include agent technology acquired from Lanacom Corp. in Toronto. The technology will let developers program agents to monitor dynamic Web pages, perform database queries, and find content developed for Microsoft's Active Desktop channels. The agents then can analyze content they find according to keywords and linguistics, reconstruct relevant content into Web pages, as well as deliver the pages through a BackWeb channel.

Other filtering technologies are starting to appear on intranets. For example, collaborative filtering products such as GroupLens from Net Perceptions Inc. in Minneapolis, track the content user's request, compare the records of users who download similar content, and let users see what peers with like interests are viewing.

Digital Knowledge Assets, a Chicago systems integrator, uses GroupLens in its DKA Information Environment, a system the company will install next month at networking company 3Com Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. The system lets users store content such as Web pages or word processing documents as objects in an object repository. A Java applet lets users assign values to each object, describing its subject matter and ranking its importance. Users create profiles of their interests using GroupLens. Every Web page they request is filled automatically with content matching their interests.

Through a custom start page, DKA Information Environment notifies end users of new content that matches their interests. The page lists the name s of co-workers, called neighbors, who need similar information, as hypertext links. When end users click on a neighbor's name, they see relevant content the neighbor has viewed and the neighbor's annotations on the content.

This adds human judgment to the filtering process, says Tim McDonald, CEO at Digital Knowledge Assets, in that users are actively involved in choosing, evaluating, and refining the material they will receive. "Ultimately," McDonald says, "humans are the best filters of information."

Netscape is also readying a product that incorporates human judgment. Due for final release by year's end, Netscape Compass Server lets companies create a taxonomy for categorizing documents stored in multiple repositories. End users list their interests in profiles stored on the server, and when they log on to an intranet, Compass builds a personal start page with links to documents that match their interests. The page also lists E-mail and voice-mail messages, faxes, calendar proposals, project upda tes, and reminders.

When a document added to a repository matches a user's interests, Compass will highlight a link to the document on the user's start page, and notify the user by E-mail or a Netscape NetCaster channel. Users will rank the material on the page in which it appears, and the rankings will be tallied on the server. Users can choose to be notified only about documents with high rankings. Only users whose interest profile matches the document's contents will be able to vote on it. An add-on product, GrapeVine for Netscape Compass Server from GrapeVine Technologies in Troy, Mich., will extend Compass' filtering capabilities. For example, it automatically categorizes incoming documents in a company's taxonomy; it lets users add comments to documents before they're routed to others.

The Human Element
Amoco Corp., the $32 billion petroleum company in Chicago, is testing Compass Server and GrapeVine in its corporate division, to be used mainly for routing incoming news feeds and E- mail. Amoco's pipeline division is using the Lotus Notes version of GrapeVine.

"The whole idea of profiling through several levels of filtering is pretty exciting," says Joe Jesson, a staff consultant at Amoco. "You not only have strict Boolean filters, but also the documents are set in context by human experts." This creates a filtered push with improved document relevance. Qualitative filtering is required in a push environment, similar to selective filters in a receiver.

Jesson says users like the personal start page, a feature that will also appear in the next version of the Notes/ Domino groupware package from Lotus Development in Cambridge, Mass. Due for release next year, Notes/Domino 5.0 will displays a dynamically generated HTML headlines page with links to documents relevant to an individual user. Users will create agents that monitor data sources such as Internet, intranet, and extranet sites; the agents will post notifications to each user's headlines page.

Lotus is also developing a " concept map"-most likely a Java applet-for Notes/Domino 5.0 that will present end users with a hierarchy of topics. Users will click through a tree of topics until they find useful Internet or intranet sites, which they will tag. Thetagging will create an agent to monitor those sites and notify the user when content changes.

As yet, no concept map or personal start page has been announced as features in upcoming products from Microsoft. But Microsoft does offer the Personalization System as part of its Site Server Internet application server. In addition, some companies have integrated the system into intranets based on other Microsoft products.

For example, Cognitive Communications, a New York intranet consulting firm, used Microsoft Personalization System for an intranet it developed for a large beverage manufacturer in the Northeast. When an end user logs on to that intranet, Personalization System starts a new thread, or record of the pages requested by the user, and tracks all documents the user has selected. The Personalization server compares indexed descriptions of the components and serves the components to the user, similar to the components the user previously requested. Then, when the user selects a new document, the system compares content the user called up beforehand to content indexed in Microsoft Index Server. Microsoft Internet Information Server then generates an Active Server Page made up of relevant content found in Index Server.

Companies can develop applications similar to the one Cognitive built using products such as Site Server. But Site Server offers pre-built components that make development easier, says Gene Phifer, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc., an IT advisory firm in Stamford, Conn.

"Microsoft Site Server with the personalization component and Compass Server are off-the-shelf versions of what people have been writing the hard way over the last two years," says Phifer. "If we can have intelligent agents running [separately] from human beings, gathering information and delivering it, we'll be a lot closer to where we need to be in the areas of knowledge management."

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