Enterprise Search Summit West Shows Organizations How to Quickly and Effectively Reap the Value from their Information Investments

Medford, NJ (PRWEB) November 6, 2009

Enterprise Search Summit West (http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/west2009) will be held November 17-19 at the San Jose Mcenery Convention Center and is co-located with KMWorld 2009 and Taxonomy Bootcamp.

This year's Enterprise Search Summit West event will focus on how leading organizations enable information access so that it can be put to work to deliver value to the bottom line.

"Enterprises invest in providing employees with essential content to help them perform their jobs and make informed decisions. These employees also generate vast amounts of valuable information on a daily basis. However, it is impossible for these organizations to derive the maximum value from this information if it can't be easily found and quickly and effectively used within work flow" says Michelle Manafy, ESS conference chair and editorial director, Enterprise Group for Information Today, Inc.

Sessions created to help organizations target this issue are:

Tuesday, November 17
In-Context Content Delivery

Search, while a powerful information retrieval tool, is primarily a pull-based technology. While an effective mechanism to retrieve information from a vast sea of data, the quality of search is limited to the way in which a user formulates queries. For example, would the user know the exact keyword to describe what he or she is looking for? Does their search change as they page through possible results? The key to effective information discovery is posing a better, dynamic query. Practical methods to implement search in a push (or discovery) will help users discover relevant information through the power of push-based discovery. It looks at several live implementations using search technology to implicitly lead users to sought-after data.
IMF Country Knowledge Exchange: Essential Country Information On Demand

This session will examine the construction of The Knowledge Exchange (KE), which provides the staff of the International Monetary Fund with a facility to locate and share important country documents. It provides a number of user friendly features aimed at reducing the amount of time staff must spend to locate final, authoritative country documents from its two official document repositories. KE allows staff to browse documents by subject matter, conduct full text searching, sort results by relevance or modification date, and to access country collaboration sites and other authoritative sources for country information. KE employs a relational rules-based faceted taxonomy that classifies documents into meaningful categories, for easy browsing. The implementation has been very popular, but there is still more to come. "All About a Country" will provide more country information on demand, including key economic and financial data, country contacts, planned travel, and other key country information on demand.

Wednesday, November 18
Getting the Most Out of Enterprise Search: Improving User Interfaces and Experiences

Many ECM designers promise users the capability to search for their corporate documents like they search for information on the web, even though strategies and information needs are often different for the two types of search. For both, though, the effectiveness of a search depends upon the trade-off of the recall vs. the precision of the system. The ideal search results include the return of all the documents that are relevant within a collection while not returning any documents that are irrelevant to the user's information needs. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task, particularly given the wide divide between the way users want to search and the way software developers design search engines. Additionally, relevance is difficult to measure as it can be defined on different dimensions and can be influenced by any number of factors. MacMillan will discuss the way today's search behaviors need to be better supported by interface designers and how organizations can support end users with training to improve search effectiveness within an organization.

For additional information visit http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/west2009.

About Information Today, Inc., organizers of the Enterprise Search Summit

Information Today, Inc.(http://www.infotoday.com), parent company of Enterprise Search and Enterprise Search Sourcebook, is a leading publisher and conference organizer in the field of technology and technology applications in today's enterprise. In addition to Enterprise Search Sourcebook, Information Today publications include Streaming Media magazine, CRM magazine, KMWorld magazine, Database Trends and Applications magazine, EventDV magazine, and EContent magazine.

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