Information Integration And Semantic Search

Here is a great story on how Shell plans to save 100s millions of dollars using Semantic Search. They estimate the savings to come from cutting the time of training their employees by providing right information based on the employee’s profile and interests.

The energy company is working with Accenture and IBM to evaluate semantic search technologies that will identify each engineer’s interests, and send them tailor-made summaries of relevant information posted by 100,000 employees worldwide.

The system will analyse a huge range of specialist engineering forums and online discussion groups, including Shell’s internal version of Wikipedia and match the posts to each engineer’s specialisms

Here are a few things they have done and plan to do:

  • Set up an internal wiki to manage knowledge in 2004 with over 60,000 active employees using it
  • Set up Yammer with over 50,000 active users
  • By rolling out technology to automatically identify and deliver the information they need, from databases, blogs and social media.

As both internal and external information explodes, every company needs to find innovative ways to discover, aggregate, filter and distribute information based on job and interest profiles of employees. It is nice to see this story.