Tools that Take Us Beyond Search and Retrieval
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Sykes

Abstract

Jan Sykes looks at recently published and upcoming articles and reviews in the Topic Series "Making Information Visible". She highlights content about tools and services which aim to facilitate discovery and ease of access to improve the user experience.

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FreePint readers are surely not surprised to see how nicely the recently-concluded Topic Series "News, and Beyond" dovetails with the current Topic Series "Making Information Visible".

With the volume of global news and social content being created and aggregated, organisations are seeking tools to make sense of it all. How can we mine, visualise, and comprehend patterns and trends, particularly in the fire hose of news content, but also in internal knowledge, relevant social media, and speciality subscription content?

As information management professionals, we are obliged to make sure our focus remains on business needs and efficiencies for users even as we are enchanted with new tools and services.

Read Our Latest Articles and Reviews

Here we highlight recent articles about tools and services that aim to facilitate discovery and ease of access to improve the user experience.

• Chris Porter reviews Commetric and its Influencer Network Analysis methodology for sifting through troves of multilingual data to identify the most influential voices on specific business topics. An outstanding aspect of Commetric is the joint attention to visualisation and human editorial services to produce relevant results.

• FreePint's interview with Larry Rafsky, chairman and chief scientist at Acquire Media (NewsEdge parent), elaborates on how visualisation aids in identifying patterns and correlations that lead to strategic business insights.

• As a follow up to the detailed NewsEdge product review, Chris Porter looks at visualisation functionality in the product. Visualisation via Heat Maps, a Topic Venn diagram, and a Tag Cloud is based on a robust underlying taxonomy. The ability to filter by relevance enhances specificity and value of the output.

Find Out What's Coming Up

• Coming soon, in a FreePint Q&A, the executive leadership team of InfoDesk share their vision of the importance of “giving the user what he wants”. This philosophy underlies InfoDesk's technology for organising and unifying metadata across disparate types of content, essential for relevant retrieval from commingled internal and external content. Another essential component of their service is human editors and taxonomists, which add significant value to automated processes.

• From the perspective of a content publisher, this delightful article, "Seven Deadly Sins Stopping You Evolving Your Search Into Solve", reminds us of the need to know our users, prepare and tag content in their language and consider the way they access information so that it can be easily discovered.

• Don't miss our upcoming Webinars and Communities of Practice sessions on topics such as user behaviour and visibility, and needs assessment for information visibility.

Take Part in Our Research 

If you have not already done so, please participate in the FreePint visibility research by completing this survey which closes on 6th March.

This Blog Item is part of the FreePint Topic Series "Making Information Visible".

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