For those not familiar with Cutter Associates, they are a premium provider of objective analysis and consulting services in the financial marketplace. I had the chance to deliver the keynote talk today at their Technology Alliance Conference in Boston.
This conference explores a broad range of issues related to the operational infrastructure financial firms need to support. I decided to focus my talk on some of the significant trends that I believe will shape the way that firms will discover information in the future. Of the seven big trends that I covered, there are three key ones that I’d like to share with you here:
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Discovery Will Become Personal – It will become increasingly important for individuals to be able to discover information using personal taxonomies that reflect their unique perspective on the key topics that they need to follow. These personal taxonomies will complement the shared global taxonomies that are provided broadly, and create a more effective and efficient way for people to discover and organize the information that is really relevant to them.
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Text Search Will Become Secondary – Though it’s central to the way the web is mined today, text search will fade in importance as a tool for information discovery. It is simply too imprecise and delivers way too much noise in the results it returns. I believe that it will be replaced by tools that provide more thematic based discovery. These tools will be based on weighted, non-Boolean matching, rules based qualifications, and statistical analysis. These approaches will make information on complex concepts much easier to find in the future.
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Discovery Will Become Pervasive – While most discussions around content discovery focus on the web, effective discovery actually needs to embrace ALL of the content sets you have available to you. This includes the content on your own desktop and email, as well as in corporate file repositories and data stores that you may have access to. Having a contextually rich framework that encompasses all of these sources will allow a new discovery model to evolve that transcends the silo limited approach most people need to deal with today.
At the heart of each of the trends I discussed in the keynote is the creation of more detailed and more personalized context that can power new approaches to information filtering. The core technologies required to create this contextual backdrop are actually all available now. They can be leveraged effectively in many of the most challenging information discovery domains firms are struggling with today.
The future of content discovery is at lot closer than most people realize…