Integrated End-user Tools
Integrated End-user Tools
Employees, customers and partners need more than a search box to find the information they need. Verity K2 Enterprise delivers the most complete range of end-user access tools available, including full-text search, parametric selection, relational taxonomies and federated search to let you implement applications that best suit your information assets, business processes and end-user needs. Verity's Open Navigation also lets you combine access tools, classification and recommendation features to dynamically lead individual users to the information they need.
Open Navigation
Open Navigation lets users intuitively "follow" a variety of paths to the information they need. It fluidly combines Verity's Relational Taxonomies, Full-text Search and Recommendation Engine to intuitively guide users across information sources to highly relevant content. Users who know what they're looking for can navigate directly to the information they need, while others can navigate documents, queries, and categories that are recommended by the system until they find information that answers their questions. Open Navigation is only available from Verity, no other vendor combines all the components necessary to create this powerful discovery tool. To see Open Navigation in action, contact your Verity representative for a live demonstration.
Relational Taxonomies
Verity's Relational Taxonomy technology lets users take alternate paths through the same topics or categories to quickly and easily narrow down on the information they need. In the example of an application to help auto dealers locate used cars for customers, the inventory manager at a dealership in San Jose could drill down through a "geographic" taxonomy to narrow the search to available cars in the local area, and then browse through a second "model" taxonomy to find 7-Series BMWs. He would then only see the cars at the intersection of the two categories: 7-Series BMWs in San Jose. Using full-text search, the manager could then quickly limit the selection to cars with heated black leather seats.
Parametric Selection
Documents that consist of mainly unstructured free text usually have associated metadata, while structured spreadsheets and databases often have columns or rows that contain unstructured text. Parametric Selection allows users to locate and retrieve information using this combination of structured information, metadata, and free text. An intuitive interface lets users easily sort and filter information by selecting pre-set parameters, and searching through filtered text fields and document content for specific text. For example, in the case of an equity research application, structured parameters like revenue, earnings, price-to-earnings ratio and daily trading volume can be selected. The descriptions of the stocks that match those parameters can then be searched for "oil and gas" to quickly locate undervalued energy companies.
Advanced Full-text Search
Verity K2 Enterprise's powerful full-text search lets you implement advanced functions "under the hood" that transparently put the power of sophisticated queries behind simple, one-word searches. Without having to learn any complex search syntax, this lets novice users benefit from the Verity Query Language's more than 35 operators and modifiers, including:
- Query expansion (includes: terms that sound like or are typographically similar to query terms; stemming; synonyms; wildcards)
- Personalised ranking
- Query-by-example
- Clustering similar results
- Boolean search syntax
Depending on your business objectives, full-text search can be augmented with the Verity Recommendation Engine's Adaptive Ranking. This combination captures both implicit and explicit user behavior to continually fine-tune results in dynamic organizations. For more information on Verity's full-text search, go to www.verity.com and download the white paper, Locate & Uncover: 4 steps to unlocking the value of your intellectual capital.
Spelling Suggestions
Spelling suggestions significantly enhance the search experience by giving end-users feedback on how to improve results by correcting their spelling. For example, in a semiconductor company, a user who typed "heaflouroethane" into the search box would be asked if he meant to search for "hexafluoroethane". Similarly, a user in the company's American manufacturing facility who searched for the same compound's "vapor pressure" would be asked if she also wanted to search for the term "vapour pressure", which is found in documents written at the company's R&D lab in the United Kingdom.
Query-based Summaries
To help end-users quickly identify the most relevant hits in a results list without actually downloading and reading an entire file, Verity can dynamically generate document summaries based on the user's query. Unlike most search solutions, Verity constructs intelligent summaries that show the context in which the query terms appear in the document. Other summary functionality unique to Verity includes administrator-defined summary length and search term highlighting within summaries.
Federated Search
Using Verity's Federated Search, a single query can bring back results from multiple sources. These include Verity K2 Collections, Verity Ultraseek indices, third-party software applications, public Web search engines, content providers and news feeds. Results from each source are merged, duplicate hits eliminated and the results lists sorted by relevancy. Result lists can also be sorted by source and category to provide multiple views. Federated Search supports various modes of user authentication to provide secure access across enterprise applications along with per-user credentials for Intranet and Internet sites.