Today’s seemingly unlimited amounts of information—online news and blog posts, social media, email, research, reports, but also scores of open data and shared information—has made knowledge an essential component of any business strategy. As a result, knowledge management applications are no longer a “nice to have” but a “must have” for any business that wants to thrive. To make the most of these applications requires a semantic technology that understands all the nuances of human communication and language. In this post, we’ll look at four commonly used knowledge management applications, that when powered by a cognitive technology, can transform your ability to take advantage of information.
Essential knowledge management applications
Whether you’re a large enterprise or a government agency, these knowledge management applications are core building blocks for taking advantage of your most essential information:
-
Intranet Search engine
Being able to find what you need inside a company isn’t always easy. Company intranets are an excellent starting point for making information available, but not every search box is equal. Accessing information often depends on users knowing where something is located (or who to call to find it). One of the most important knowledge management applications, therefore, is a strong, semantic search engine that can reach all of your enterprise content, and retrieve the precise items that you’re looking for—marketing reports, product data sheets, customer information, patent records, etc. — with the same speed and effectiveness that you would expect from a typical internet search.
-
Document classification based on customized taxonomy
Simply storing the company knowledge is useless: Effective enterprise search, therefore, starts with deploying classification and taxonomy development tools rooted in an understanding of language. The taxonomy must reflect your organization’s unique vocabulary—the acronyms, products and project code names that your internal users know by heart—in order to be truly useful; a full understanding of meaning can help distinguish between different contextual uses of information. Both are essential for delivering precise information for search and other applications. For example, an energy company has its own language, which requires a specific and customized taxonomy that is able to associate content to the classes and nodes with great precision.
-
Entity extraction
Identifying entities contained in content—people, places, locations, organizations, as well ascustomized organizational entities— can provide a useful view of unknown data sets by immediately revealing the who, what and where contained in your information. Entity extraction is an essential knowledge management application that helps transform unstructured data to data that is structured, and therefore machine readable and available for standard processing that can be applied for a number of business activities. .
-
Customer feedback analysis
The opinions expressed online by your customers and users contain valuable insight about your companies, brands, competitors, products and services. Being able to analyze the signals and feedback left by consumers on social media, forums, reviews or classic survey mechanisms requires truly understanding what is being expressed and how. Semantic-powered knowledge management applications can cut through the slang, jargon and use of different languages to provide strategic value from customer feedback.
