i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

A Contextual Discovery Engine is a search which does a context sensitive searches so that even the information which is present in unstructured data can be retrieved. This not only searches for terms which are similar in the syntax and meaning but it will also search for everything that has been used in a similar context. It will then group the searches by the context.

To take an example from the website of such a search engine www.sophiasearch.com, Java can stand for

• a country.
• a language
• a coffee bean.

This can be of a great benefit in an enterprise from my experience. This will yield the terms which are not just similar in the vocabulary but also it will also fetch the data which has been used in the same context.

So each search will have the search results categorized into various contexts. This is a great help in an enterprise because sometimes very good ideas go unnoticed because the person who was taking the minutes of the meeting did not use the right terms or did not give a good title to the meeting notes. So even if the idea is there, it gets filed and forgotten in large amount of enterprise data. Now, this new feature will improve the probabiility of retrieving such ideas.