NFAIS 50th Annual Conference

Today and tomorrow I'll be at NFAIS 50th Annual Gala. This year's theme is "The New Information Order: Its Culture, Content and Economy".

The keynote speaker was David Weinberger. He elaborated on "scarce knowledge" and "knowledge without authority" and how "conversation drives bugs out knowledge".

He also mentioned the importance of "making connection between meaning and knowledge" which can be a great intro for the launch of our new product.


Tomorrow there is a member only lunch and Kevin Bouley, NFAIS and Nerac's President has prepared a scavenger hunt for this meeting.

We are almost there

The countdown has started for the launch of a unique online research solution powered by some very clever and talented Mountain View guys who like eating New Orleans cuisine.

Coming Soon

to a browser near you, something that will reveal insights and solutions from billions of documents

Will Harvard take the lead to encourage proffessors to publish online?

"Harvard University's arts and sciences faculty may vote today on a plan that could alter the landscape of academia by encouraging professors to publish research online rather than only in scholarly journals."

The debate over where research gets published pits people who say it should be publicly accessible against those who say bypassing journals and their peer-review process might harm the quality of academic work. Harvard's decision may influence other schools, said Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at the university.

``This is one of those situations where Harvard really has an opportunity to be a worthy leader in academia, really champion something that makes all kinds of sense for the good of the world,'' Lewis said in a telephone interview today. via Bloomberg

Where ever they are published we still need a way to get the "insights" out of these published materials to find the "solutions" to our questions, and support our decision making process in R&D

Cost effective way analyzing patent data

In the latest issue of Searcher magazine, Robert March, information scientist at Du Pont writes about the importance of analyzing structured and unstructured data for identifying trends which is a "technology intelligence" activity. He outlines how to use word and excel to analyze patent content.

He ends up the article by "automatic categorization of the unstructured text can save time and money and lead data becoming information, information becoming knowledge, and knowledge becoming wisdom".

These guys in Mountain View also are working very hard (when they are not eating New Orleans cuisine) to figure out how to transform information to knowledge and insights in very unique way.

Information Silos and SiloBreaker

Paula J Hane has a good review of SiloBreaker's "intelligent" solution in Information Today.

Few years ago I had the pleasure working with and meeting SiloBreaker team. They understand the information industry's problem well and they execute on it quickly. They are one of the few companies like Talis and the one in Mountain View that understand what to do with information overload, how to provide insight and extract meaning from the information.

As Daniel Pollack from Outsell states in the review "findability" is increasingly important. And for R&D professionals "findability for solutions" is crucial for their R&D investments decision.

Tackling information overload

SemantiNet is a start-up that leverages semantic web "concepts to seamlessly integrate information and services so that you will be able to achieve more while working less!"
In the information industry we are all after "connecting the users to knowledge", revealing the deep meaning of the text and illuminating insights which are hidden in the documents. The company is backed by Giza Ventures and Yossi Vardi who backed ICQ years ago.