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Who is a more likely a candidate for a knowledge management initiative than a newspaper organization? The Newspaper Association of America (NAA), a group that consists mainly of daily newspapers, has embarked on a KM project that involves collecting, indexing and sharing data on a broad range of technical issues affecting the NAA’s 2,000-plus member companies.
The NAA will use intelligent search technology from Convera to index thousands of scanned documents, text files, images and multimedia files. Staff will use the software interface to locate relevant information regardless of file type or location, and share that information with constituents as needed.
The NAA receives many requests from members seeking information about a variety of technical issues. While the association has a wide range of subject matter experts and information regarding technology issues of interest to members, those knowledge assets are dispersed across multiple document repositories, printed materials, listserve forums, electronic bulletin boards and other data centers.
“In addition to managing text files, we plan to integrate hundreds of multimedia files gathered from the technology conferences, presentations and training programs we offer,” says Tom Croteau, NAA’s senior VP of technology.
The NAA, for example, might receive a call from a member looking for information on how to implement computer-to-plate technology. A staff member will launch the search interface and perform a natural language query by typing in “computer to plate.” In addition to returning results that match the keywords chosen, the software expands the search using closely related terms to find files that contain relevant information on the subject, even if the words “computer” and “plate” are not contained anywhere in the file.
The search results might include a research report, a magazine article, a link to a streaming media file from an NAA conference session and the name of the staff member who is most knowledgeable in that particular subject area.
“We want to give our staff fast, efficient access to the best information available, regardless of where that information resides and regardless of its native format,” says Stephen Paolinelli, knowledge manager of NAA technology. “One of our primary objectives is to integrate the process of retrieving information contained in internal documents with information available on the Web.”
Toward that end, the group is also using RetrievalWare’s multimedia Web spider/crawler to supplement existing information resources. It will be used to probe a large number of external Web pages and collect up-to-the-minute news and information.