Tag Archives: Sweden

Enterprise search case study: Vårdaktörsportalen makes reliable information easy to find for health professionals

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Vårdaktörsportalen (VAP) is a portal for health care providers made by Västra Götalandsregionen (VGR). This portal makes information from a number of reliable and authorised sources findable and accessible for the people who need it in their daily work. This stretches from doctors and nurses to medical secretaries primarily located in the region of Västra Götaland, Sweden. The site and most of its features and information is also accesible (in Swedish) to anyone through http://vap.vgregion.se. In November 2012 the first version of this site went live and Findwise had a big role in the creation of this search centric site. The main source of information for VAP is the regional guidelines found in a document repository within VGR but some other external sources are also included. These include trustworthy authorities like

  • Socialstyrelsen
  • Läkemedelsverket
  • SBU
  • TLV
  • 1177 – the public health care information site for citizens

This search solution is built around the open source search engine Apache Solr and our common tools for processing and indexing. For this site we have also implemented a rather unique metadata enhancement service that automatically extracts keywords from the document to index and attaches it as metadata. The keyword extraction is based on information from the medical term database SweMeSH. More information (in Swedish) can be found on Google Code. We also include synonyms to keywords to increase recall, making it easier to find documents regardless of what synonym used.

The metadata enhancement service was included because the quality of metadata on the external sites was not very good. VGR will work with the above mentioned authorities to try and make them understand that they would benefit if they improved their data. The source 1177 stands out with very good meta data and overall good quality texts.

We have conducted a user study to see how this first version is able to satisfy user demands. The result of that study shows that some local sources are missing, but a general positive feedback on the idea and the graphical design was collected.

Findwise is looking forward to continue working on VAP with VGR in the future to make it an even better tool.

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Collaborative, Social and Adaptive Relevance in Enterprise Search

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Providing spot-on results with good relevance in Enterprise Search solutions is one of the hardest tasks when working with findability. Sure, it is doable to work out a generic model for ranking results based on the organization’s most common requirements on findability in conjunction with available metadata of the information made findable. But is it enough?

The burning question is: How can you ensure that the generic relevance model does not get outdated once the Findability solution has been in use for a month, half a year, a year and the implementation crew is long gone?

Findwise recently released a large Enterprise Findability solution at a customer in the electrical power industry in Sweden. In the project we identified personalized and adaptive relevance as two key requirements for the findability solution to provide real, future-proof value-in-use to a large set of people with fundamentally different roles within the company. This blog post will focus on the latter requirement, adaptiveness: How can we make sure that an Enterprise Findability solution returns search results that become better and better as the solution is used?

Let user behavior improve the behavior of the search tool

The Enterprise Findability solution rolled out at the power company contains two features that, put together, build the foundation of a continuously improving relevance model:

  1. A feature that promotes popular content given a query term – “social relevance”
  2. A feature that continuously changes the relevance model by boosting the relevance of popular documents – “adaptive relevance

Social relevance

Inspired by e-commerce actors on the web, the delivered Enterprise Findability solution uses the logged behavior of its users to promote popular content. When an end-user searches for, e.g. “terawatt hours”, the solution by default offers search results ranked and sorted according to the generic relevance model. This is what any search tool would do. But this solution also uses search logs to promote popular content just as e-commerce sites have been doing for years – “Other people searching for ‘terawatt hours’ viewed ‘Current power production’ (intranet page), ‘Definition of terms in the electrical power industry’ (PDF document)” etc.

By combining the intel of the search logs (where the end-user behavior of an Enterprise Findability solution is constantly collected) and the best bets (editorially provided “sponsored links”) with the regular search result, end-users are presented with a rich set of information answering their original question from different angles. And the best part of it is that the social relevance feature constantly improves as the tool is used. People get better results as time goes by.

Adaptive relevance

In addition to the social relevance feature, the vast amount of real search behavior compiled in the search logs is used for improving the generic relevance model as well. The solution tracks changes in popularity of content and adapts the document-level scores of documents and web pages in the search index accordingly. If a document is accessed often through the search tool, the document will be deemed “more important” and start climbing towards top positions in the search result. And if a previously popular document becomes less popular as time goes by, the document’s impact on the relevance model is decreased. In the end, content that has great importance for a limited amount of time (such as news items and weekly lunch menus) will first peek and then dip in the search index. The search index and the generic relevance model attached to it will stay fresh.

From generic to personalized search experience

This blog post has pinpointed a couple of solutions for a continuously-improving, generic relevance model in an Enterprise Findability solution. Obviously, generic models are generic, i.e. good enough for the many, not perfect for the few. There are great ways to address personalization solving many of the role-based challenges of Enterprise Findability, but let’s leave that to another, future blog post. Stay tuned!

Findwise in Cooperation with Borås University College Receives Research Grant

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In recent decades Swedish and Western industry have had to adapt to the new paradigm. Moving from classical production industry organizations towards knowledge companies in which sales of services and knowledge are often bundled with a product – resulting in a complete solution. This change is vital for the survival of the Western world’s economy which previously has been built upon organizations of heavy industrial giants optimizing production processes and factory outputs by reducing overheads and increasing quality.

The threat to the industry from low cost countries, which no longer only compete just on low cost, but also with high quality and competence, forces Western organizations to develop new strategies to sustain their growth and competitive advantage. Cutting margins in order to compete with low cost countries is a downward spiral. Instead changing the model, to be able to provide knowledge and holistic understanding of customers needs and the ability to rapidly deliver a complete solution is now becoming the key competitive advantage. This however requires investment in IT and knowledge exchange tools. By moving away from selling physical products and components to solutions higher margins are possible because more business value is exchanged in the transactions.

The organizations adapting to this change, are identifiable by the fact that they consider knowledge and information as corporate assets – treated and cared for as any other asset. One example is the Swedish company SKF Group whose new vision is the “Knowledge Engineering Company” where the company going through a change from component supplier to a holistic supplier of both products and services.

A key success factor in this transformation from products to solutions is that the supply of knowledge and information to the employees is effective, easy to use and complete. The organization succeeds in providing that extra value, thereby allowing higher margins. Historical key performing indicators (KPIs) such as factory output, reduction of defects and increasing of quality, are dealing with physical production efficiency to ensure as little cost per unit manufactured and as high quality as possible. Individuals are used to measuring these KPIs and provide a way to manage the operational production processes. The turnover and efficiency of information and knowledge exchange lacks these models and measurement tools, thereby not allowing them to be managed. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage, or improve.

One technical solution which has the capabilities to enable complete, rapid and reduced turnover time for knowledge and information exchange, is Enterprise Search. This has been recognized by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, which granted Findwise AB research funds to tackle this problem in cooperation with the College University of Borås in the Strategic Mobility program. The funded project will study the usefulness and value of a well functioning search engine for work-related information use. It will also identify performing indicators for information and knowledge exchange through search and to achieve results that systematically will illustrate the quantitative direct effects together with soft indirect effects.

The project will start early 2010 and run through the entire year. As part of the project, Dr. Katriina Byström will join Findwise and work together with Findwise employees in this joint research project. Findwise customers are invited to participate in the project and will have the availability to influence its direction. For more information on research at Findwise contact Henrik Strindberg.

About Dr. Katriina Byström
Dr. Katriina Byström is an associate professor in the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University College of Borås & Goteborg University, Sweden. She is one of initiators and director of the IA bachelor’s programme at Swedish School of Library and Information Science, and she is a chair for the programme with teaching involvement broadly across the curricula. Furthermore , Katriina is associate editor and co-founder at the Journal of Information Architecture. Katriina’s degree is in information studies, and her research focus on task-based information seeking, information retrieval and information architecture.

Information Discovery: Search-in-page

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Sometimes the users know exactly what they are looking for, sometimes they are just looking to discover new areas. When it comes to information discovery, a plain, one dimensional result list is not the most suitable tool.

Worldwide you’ll find quite a few innovative solutions, some of them mentioned in Findwise’s blog earlier: Quintura and KartOO are two search engines that visualize the clusters of results and the relationships between them, as Clusty that let you discover related topics.  Other examples are projects like Zuula and Dogpile that aggregates results and let you know what you can find in Google, Yahoo, Live, Exalead etc from one single search box – hopefully helping you find new perspectives.

In a few days time Searchinpage, created by entrepreneurs in Sweden, will be available.
Searchinpage let you use any word in the result, mark it and use it as input for a new query. By enabling the users to search instantly, this will hopefully create other ways to explore and discover areas related to your initial query. Searchinpage will be available in a public version and as a special solution for enterprises and organizations with specific needs. The new player seems to have a lot of cards up their sleeves (including linguistic functionality and ideas similar to Zuula and Dogpile) – worth keeping an eye on.