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Making Sense with ContextPortal™
Content
What is ContextPortal?
ContextPortal™ is a platform that adds a context-centric view of information to your office applications. ContextPortal™ offers a set of tools and techniques that provide automatic organization of unstructured information into rich context maps providing knowledge navigation and discovery at the corporate and personal levels.
The creation of context maps is an automatic process for assigning unstructured content such as text documents, web pages, and e-mail, into context-based information pools. ContextPortal™ provides a conceptual framework for knowledge organization. It employs pattern matching and learning approaches to assist users in knowledge browsing and discovery.
ContextPortal™ displays information in a tiled browser that shows information in the context of other related information. For each document you are provided with information about the document's content that includes the most relevant key phrases and a concise summary with highlighted terms. This takes the form of a navigable context map. For each individual document you are provided with descriptive hyperlinks to other documents within the set and to other concept sets.
Two applications are offered: ContextPortal™ for Microsoft Outlook® and ContextPortal™ for Windows 200x.
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How does ContextPortal™ help me search for information?
ContextPortal's main job is context management. While viewing one piece of information, you have access to other related pieces. This provides a context to better appreciate the relevance of the information in question. The ready availability of connected information benefits your search process. Instead of working in an information vacuum where an interesting piece of information is isolated, you are working in an information network where many possible relationships are exposed and you are able to easily explore the overall context. The context serves as an intelligent roadmap for guiding your information investigations.
How does ContextPortal™ help me with my work?
Each day you are faced with problems or decisions that require further investigation in order to respond. In other cases you are asked to assemble a clear picture from a large information base. The information you find in text needs to be verified against other text sources for accuracy and completeness. You must therefore invest a lot of effort in information research. However, information research takes too much of your valuable time and given stringent deadlines, you cannot take full advantage of corporate information resources. You are familiar with the following situations: "I can't find what I know is already somewhere" on the one hand, to "I need to know what relevant information I don't know yet about" on the other hand.
ContextPortal™ gives you the handles - context metadata - to assist you in identifying the content that is fitting for your current context. ContextPortal™ engages you in a dialog that uses concepts, relationships, and relevant key phrases to guide you to discover the most pertinent information and presents the findings as a navigable context map.
ContextPortal™ was specifically designed to make context an integral part of everything you do by automatically hi-lighting the relevant corporate information as you go about your work.
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Why would I need ContextPortal?
ContextPortal™ helps make sense of large and dispersed data sets. It uses concept matching technology to improve understanding of the content. Learning through pattern recognition is its foundation (please note that the standard keyword search approach does not support "learning" through use). ContextPortal™ takes into account the context in which terms appear. This allows identifying documents that contain terms of interest to you but only within specific concepts and relationships of interest. This approach eliminates the return of many irrelevant documents while also identifying documents which, though they may not contain the specific term, do include the concept and relationships of importance to you in your present context.
How does ContextPortal™ help to intelligently guide information exploration?
Unstructured information can only be managed and used efficiently when you can interpret and understand its content in context. The absence of such a capability is a major barrier to the effective and efficient use of information by organizations and by individuals.
ContextPortal™ enhances your understanding by helping to identify related information and concepts. This is the area in which contextual knowledge is most valuable. By assembling just the right information from a variety of sources, ContextPortal™ reduces your information overload. And because it brings only the pertinent clusters of information to your attention you maintain focus on the most relevant aspects of your work.
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How does ContextPortal™ help with learning?
Very often, needed information is hidden somewhere in a large number of directories or is not discovered because it is not practical to analyze and identify all the unstructured content in the repositories. However, with ContextPortal™ information can be arranged by concepts and roles. You benefit by easily discovering pertinent information through browsing a knowledge map and you always see the information as it's linked to concepts and other information. By seeing these relationships you can, up front, better understand a document's meaning and significance.
With ContextPortal™ you have access to and work with, relationships between documents, e-mails, tasks and people across multiple directories and applications. You also see your information as it relates to the concepts of your domain. This is how you always see your information in context.
How does ContextPortal™ save my time?
Lots of time is wasted when you need to interrupt your work and train of thought to search for additional information from your files or especially, the corporate files. As you write a document, create a presentation or prepare an e-mail message, you can handily explore ContextPortal™ knowledge maps to evaluate and augment your ideas or find links to relevant information. By quickly locating needed information, you can you can focus on analysis, options and decisions.
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How does ContextPortal™ work?
ContextPortal™ was designed with the belief that computers should adapt to the way users work rather than forcing users to adopt unnatural work practices. Human beings need to work with concepts, ideas, relationships, beliefs, abstractions, and emotions. Computers require information represented by numbers, equations, algorithms, and functions. These differences demand computer technology with means to interpret and present information so it is friendly to human ways of thinking.
ContextPortal™ technology enables computers to present a conceptual view of text residing in documents, Web pages, and e-mails etc. ContextPortal™ software analyses textual content and determines the key concepts, the relevant key phrases and the relationships between the information pieces.
The software creates a network of relationships to provide connectivity of information based on relevancy to particular concepts of the domain in question. ContextPortal™ allows unstructured information to be personalized, organized and delivered to users by automatically analyzing and categorizing the unstructured content. It does so by identifying concepts, patterns of terms usage and ideas as well as capturing and using relationships provided by individual users.
How does ContextPortal™ automate context discovery?
ContextPortal™ uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised methods to organize documents by concepts. After initial seeding of a concepts framework, a fully-automated, unsupervised method of dynamic matching and clustering of documents produces the context linking and mapping. This concept learning and discovery process is dynamic and keeps up with the evolving knowledge base as the new content is created.
Note that all ContextPortal™ operations are accessible and amenable to human oversight.
What are the sources of context?
There are two major ways of context development. The first, ContextPortal™ automatically identifies information items that share similar concepts and terms. Or second, you can choose to enrich ContextPortal's metadata yourself by recording your own insights on important information, concepts and relationships and, expressing your views on the potential uses of the information. ContextPortal™ will assist you in these activities and help you choose roles for the relationships. This greatly eases the work involved and your inputs over time will make your portal truly context-rich.
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