Content
What is context?
Information is often not useful alone. It needs to be selectively amplified and filtered by its context because the human mind must use context to make sense of what information is relevant in a given situation. We need to consider pieces of information not only individually, but also within a broader context of other information that will influence our understanding. Contextual knowledge shapes our tasks, objectives and decisions as we become aware of related facts. In short, context situates information in relation to other broader knowledge and allows us to act with better understanding and judgment.
Why is context important?
You realize that most of your unstructured information, and often your structured information, exist outside of anything that tells you of its context. When you access a document you may know who wrote it, when it was written, its size or where it resides, but you have little or no insight into its purpose, how it could be used, how it evolved or how it performed.
Knowing information in context is a significant enabler of productivity. Seeing the most relevant documents, web pages, e-mails, or contact information in relation to issues that are pertinent to your current need and areas of interest allows assessment of important influences quickly with minimum search time. This reduces the need for reinvention and re-working cycles. A system that can establish the context of unstructured information significantly accelerates productivity by delivering information relevant to the business task at hand.
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Why is contextual knowledge of particular help?
Users have a constant need to rapidly interpret large quantities of information and search results. The process involves examining content, looking for familiar terms and deciding whether or not the particular content is relevant. Business processes in which numerous participants interact across multiple applications, or where it is important to assemble information from diverse fields, benefit especially from seeing information in context. Context in these situations is the shared and relevant threads in e-mail, documentation, notes and references accumulated over time and spread across multiple applications and directories.
What is unstructured information?
Unstructured information is frequently defined by what it is not: it is not data in tabular form like a spreadsheet or database. Unstructured information is typically not pre-analyzed and not readily understandable by machines because it has no formal structure other than implicit structure imposed by the rules of good writing and the linguistics and conventions of natural language. Common examples of unstructured information are books, e-mail, documents, letters, news, articles, presentations, images, audio, etc.
Most tangible information held by organizations is in unstructured form. Companies need to use unstructured information to support all aspects of their operations. The oft-quoted statistic is that only 15-20 percent of information is in structured form and easily accessed. The full use of unstructured information has been hampered because finding relevant information quickly in the ocean of unstructured data is extremely difficult.
As the value of content hidden in organizations’ vast repositories increases, investment in solutions that can intelligently identify the relevant content and context of text files are needed. Recently, the emergence of software-based context management tools has helped organizations to access their valuable information with the help of context maps.
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How does software help the understanding of context?
Conventional technologies use keywords to identify specific information. However, this approach has serious limitations because words have many meanings and many words can be used to describe the same thing. A more effective approach is to use a concept-based methodology that applies the intended meaning of words in their correct context.
There is emerging class of software tools capable of understanding the main thrust of a piece of text and, by analyzing the patterns, relating it to similar documents to suggest matching contexts. This concept-based approach overcomes the problem with the keyword approach. Keywords can identify documents where a search term appears, but cannot tell how relevant the document is to the subject being researched.
The issues to be addressed in your daily work have become more numerous and complex and routinely involve several participants, departments and they extend across time. Aggregated knowledge about the tasks, projects, processes, people, intentions, history, and conversational threads set the context of an issue. Typically the sources of this knowledge are scattered in different applications and document sources
The need is for software that offers a context-centric view and assembles this information for presentation in a way that allows users to focus on the content and relationships. This is required for insights and knowledge to emerge.
How does ContextPortal™ turn context into knowledge?
Leveraging organizational knowledge is one of the biggest challenges faced by an organization in today’s heavily computerized world. The collective expertise and experience of a company’s employees is one of its most valuable assets but is commonly underutilized. Most information received by a company arrives in an unfriendly, unstructured form.
ContextPortal™ dynamically analyzes unstructured information and relates documents to a single concept or to groups of concepts also linked by relationships. This allows any document, contact, or set of documents to be found, accessed and used, based solely on their placement within context maps. Context maps allow you to browse and explore this inter-related information to give you an intelligent overview of the relevant information that supports your judgments and decision-making. ContextPortal™ transforms your unstructured information into knowledge by making it accessible through contextual relations. Instead of returning information in isolation, ContextPortal™ leverages your unstructured information by suggesting and presenting other relevant information for you to examine.
ContextPortal™ helps you with knowledge reuse. With its powerful knowledge discovery technologies, it supports effective mining of existing information resources. It enables teams to collaborate by providing a web portal to serve as a central, on-line, repository for sharing documents and tasks in context. It is also a place to hold discussion forums and to post surveys and feedback.
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