Posted by Semantix

I will be presenting at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York on 12th/13th May 2009. My session is on Tuesday 12th, entitled Social Search for Knowledge Sharing and will cover the innovative use of a search vendor’s Application Programming Interface (API) to support a personalised web search facility for members of a Community of Practice Platform, enabling better precision and improved relevance of search results when compared with a standard web search. The following is a brief synopsis of the session:

The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) for local government has integrated Exalead’s API online search functionality into its Communities of Practice (CoP) Platform. Many online communities have been established by local authority and IDeA staff. Community facilitators can now generate a “favourite” list of websites for members that are used as the basis of their domain-specific online searches. This improves precision and relevance of results, since only CoP member-recommended websites are included in the search. The effect is that members of the CoP platform —all 411 councils in local government in England and Wales—have access to a collectively agreed set of favourite websites to support the knowledge domains of their individual Communities of Practice.

This is an example of the ‘wisdom of crowds’, where a collective membership determine and agree an optimised ‘favourits’ list of websites  that can be dynamically refined on the basis of the precision and relevance of the results to their domain of knowledge.

A discount on the usual registration fee for the event is available or use discount code SPEAK3 when registering.