”Bug’s-Eye” View or a “Bird’s-Eye” Perspective?

Could you imagine going through life with only a bug's-eye view of the world? Or would you prefer the perspective of a bird as it soars from the heights to ground level, providing the complete scope and context of your surroundings? If you are like most people, you would clearly prefer the latter to the former. Yet, why have most corporations today settled for the metaphorical equivalent of a bug's-eye view of their business data?

One of the unanticipated by-products of Moore's Law is the explosive growth of data. Since computing power and resources can double every 18 months, the growth in data created and stored as a result of that computing power has grown exponentially. To corral this information-rich world, a new approach to search with a navigation-based underpinning is required.

Most organizations have relied on traditional keyword search technology in order to satisfy specific business queries within specific data repositories. Traditional portals, search engines and enterprise search tools are good at retrieving a large data set, but poor at quickly sifting through the results to get to the specific information required. This is the difference between a bird's-eye and bug's-eye view. With navigation, people do not need to know how to ask for information they need (like they do with Google) because relevant content is presented to them in facets, and they immediately get a sense of all the content that is available on a particular topic. Navigation is the perfect marriage between the bird's-eye and bug's-eye view.

Imagine a bookstore or library with no visible inventory, and only a clerk to ask for assistance. In this example—which demonstrates the inherent limitations of traditional search—a shopper is not aware of the kinds of books the store carries or specializes in, whether it has books on the shopper's desired topic of interest or how many books relate to that topic. All the shopper can do is to provide the clerk with a few descriptive terms, which at best results in a list of the most popular books, not necessarily the ones most suited to the needs of the consumer.

In contrast, with a navigational experience that spotlights the full scope of available items, shoppers quickly get a sense of the store's organization, characteristics and quantity of material available for selection as soon as they enter. The clerk becomes only one way to find what is desired. A shopper can freely move from one area of interest to another, such as looking for books available on a topic, identifying what other books the author has written and finding whether there is a paperback edition of the desired book.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines "navigation" as "the act of navigating" and "navigate" as "to steer a course through a medium." The digital equivalent of navigation in the real world is faceted navigation. It answers two questions for the user: (1.) What's here? and (2.) How do I get to where I want from here? Search doesn't answer these questions very well.

Know What You Don't Know
Traditional search has been revolutionized by faceted navigation today, allowing organizations to intelligently find and act on information they need to make business decisions. Navigation-based solutions aggregate data from different sources and format and organize it, allowing users to navigate content from a bird's-eye view—a big picture view of all the information available—to drill down to the bug's-eye view—the specific dataset users are looking for. This gives the knowledge worker a perspective on what they don't know that they should. Ultimately "knowing what you don't know" adds significant value to the individual knowledge worker as well as the enterprise at large.

Faceted navigation breaks down the distinctions between: free text search and database; "slicing and dicing;" finding and discovering; search and analytics; text retrieval and fact retrieval. Navigation delivers context and scope for exploration and discovery. The true value of faceted navigation can be realized around the following business issues:

• Dynamic navigation: Ability to dynamically deliver scope and context as well as pivot and sub-setting for metadata instead of hard-coding navigation into all Web and application requirements; deliver everything from a bird's-eye to a bug's-eye view of information.
• 360º view: Ability to aggregate internal and external data sources to provide a complete view of a person, place or thing, delivering a visualization to previously unrealized relationships.
• Regulatory compliance (eDiscovery): Answering the following question: How do I find the information I need to meet various regulatory reporting requirements? With increasing regulation, enterprises need to retain an ever-increasing amount of information and retrieve that data and supply it to regulators quickly and accurately. Further complicating the landscape for enterprise IT managers is more complex storage requirements for the discovery of this information. Enter dynamic navigation, which gives the IT manager a view at all the data related to a particular request, plus the ability to pinpoint the specific data set needed.
• Communities of interest: Ability to aggregate internal and external information sources in order to establish a "total topic-relevant view" for greater "brand stickiness" and/or "brand expansion."
• Navigation prototype/development: Ability to rapidly (in minutes/hours, not days/weeks) prototype and develop the selection, aggregation and organization of metadata for navigation into Web and application requirements, dramatically cutting development time and resource requirements.
• Semantic middleware: Ability to leverage industry standards (RDF/OWL) to serve as a semantic middleware (aggregation, organization, navigation) engine between metadata sources and presentation layer, dramatically cutting development time and resource requirements.