Knowledge Focus joins hands with Knowledge Concepts

Johannesburg, 07 Jun 2005

Information asset management solution provider Knowledge Focus and Dutch linguistics company Knowledge Concepts have joined forces to offer solutions that address companies` ever-growing need for timely and accurate information retrieval and knowledge management.

Knowledge Concepts develops, sells, integrates and maintains knowledge management applications for the corporate intranet or extranet. The company`s products and services are geared to increasing the semantic functionality of the corporate intranet, thereby lightening the load for the user to find and process information.

"Knowledge Concepts has developed techniques to extract conceptually relevant terminology from existing customer-specific data and derive transparent and flexible taxonomies and semantic networks from it," says Knowledge Focus managing director Piet Dempsey. "We integrate these derivatives with Convera RetrievalWare to offer a combination that delivers excellent performance and extreme flexibility in the search for knowledge, without the traditional burden of having to develop expensive and time-consuming taxonomies or semantic networks."

"Corporate knowledge management systems benefit considerably from semantic technologies," says Knowledge Concepts business development manager Jan Paul Raven. "Currently, most of these systems rely on statistical analysis of words or links within documents to deduce the overall meaning and importance of documents. This approach is limited, however.

"Semantic technologies provide faster and more accurate search results and reduces the effort and expense required to analyse and manage information. This gives businesses a real fast-mover advantage over competitors, so essential in rapidly changing market conditions, and ultimately leads to increased revenue."

"Search alone is insufficient for finding real answers to complex problems, and today`s knowledge workers are spending too much time looking for information," Dempsey. "Taxonomies can provide both enhanced metadata for organisational content and rich browsing structures for end-users, thus helping companies to organise their enterprise information, improve the user`s search and browsing experience, and expose hidden assets by achieving information consistency across the enterprise."

Knowledge Focus

Established in August 2000, Pretoria-based Knowledge Focus specialises in digital asset management and markets a range of products to help customers manage their information assets. The company supports and serves organisations that need to retrieve information quickly and accurately, and focuses specifically on the retrieval and preservation sectors. Knowledge Focus has extensive experience in the competitive intelligence and strategic marketing intelligence markets, and is a master reseller for a number of exciting technologies that enable these business functionalities.

These include media asset management (MAM) solutions for the broadcast and entertainment industry, as well as RetrievalWare from US-based company Convera. RetrievalWare is a knowledge discovery platform that combines proven enterprise search and categorisation capabilities with dynamic classification methodology to help organisations automate knowledge management and discovery processes. The solution maximises return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages.

Knowledge Focus` clients include Eskom, Technikon SA, Gensec, Kumba Resources, Government, M-Net and NEMISA.

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