Our company provides Web solutions searching, mining and harvesting knowledge specific to our customers’ needs and presenting it to them in ways easy for them to use.

This knowledge comes from a variety of sources like the World Wide Web, subscription services or internal sources. Our customers typically come from [...]]]> Donald Hogan, CEO, KnowledgeWatch

Our company provides Web solutions searching, mining and harvesting knowledge specific to our customers’ needs and presenting it to them in ways easy for them to use.

This knowledge comes from a variety of sources like the World Wide Web, subscription services or internal sources. Our customers typically come from fast changing industries, e.g., bio science, healthcare and we’re addressing additional subject domains.  But, they have a few things in common: they’re constantly challenged with the speed of change in their field, the amount of new information published every single day, e.g., new discoveries, new methodologies, products, regulations, laws; let alone competitors’ moves for the markets they operate in.

So, when information relevant to our customers’ success is released they want to know about it instantly, yet without having to spend hours or even minutes to search for it.  This timely knowledge in their hands becomes an important advantage allowing our customers to react faster, with more precision and before competitors or their own customers.

We at KnowledgeWatch are regularly enhancing our knowledge management services enabling our customers to not only receive knowledge efficiently on what they know about but also helping them learn about newly published subjects they did not know existed or would be published.  These features are based on our technology called Knowledge Discovery.

Knowledge Discovery enables companies to set in motion automated knowledge harvesting based on collaborative views from those employee groups for which certain knowledge is really important to them.  Its capability is to automatically push new knowledge into the employee’s view so he or she doesn’t need to make notes to follow-up.  With our Knowledge Discovery we’re mining for knowledge in news and other content sources and our systems manage the automated “watch” for them – so our customers have time and energy to do more strategic work.

Automated, private and with little to no effort involved, just simple!

In today’s world, change is accelerating beyond the pace knowledge workers can keep up through traditional information channels that are broadcast based.  Broadcast based means the information channels send out information – and you receive and consume the information – when you are able to.  Yes, we’re talking about newspapers, [...]]]> Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch

In today’s world, change is accelerating beyond the pace knowledge workers can keep up through traditional information channels that are broadcast based.  Broadcast based means the information channels send out information – and you receive and consume the information – when you are able to.  Yes, we’re talking about newspapers, magazines, radio, television and available consultative information as in written reports. 

In that broadcast model, which has worked pretty well for a couple thousand years, knowledge workers act on what they’ve learned from these “broadcasts” and workers strive to innovate due to knowing and acting on new, changed information.  Problem now is there’s so much change you need to know about workers simply cannot keep up with the volume and faster arrival speed of changed information. 

From mathematics we know that speed squared means acceleration.  It is clear change in technology is happening at an accelerating pace.  Trying to keep up with your own field using outdated methods will only keep you behind others (your competitors) with their smarter approaches.       

KnowledgeWatch believes the Web provides an outstanding environment for a new, much more useful model to receive knowledge.  The new model is not dependent on pre-existing, broadcast-based channels, however it’s fully compatible with them.  The Web actually provides a foundation for delivery of a richer, easier to consume medium.

KnowledgeWatch is dedicated to study, develop, practice and master providing more useful alternatives of knowledge delivery that are fully compatible with traditional broadcast channels.          

Next:  Comparing Broadcast to a New Approaches

Picking up from our last post on simple TMI, (too much information) we’re all now experiencing on the Web a new period toward a phase of what KnowledgeWatch thinks of, (or calls) Web Addressable Knowledge. Fundamentals have occurred that enable this Addressable Knowledge Period. One fundamental is the proliferation of [...]]]> Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch

Picking up from our last post on simple TMI, (too much information) we’re all now experiencing on the Web a new period toward a phase of what KnowledgeWatch thinks of, (or calls) Web Addressable Knowledge. Fundamentals have occurred that enable this Addressable Knowledge Period. One fundamental is the proliferation of RSS or Really Simple Syndication content publishing. Another fundamental is people understanding and desiring to address content from many, many content sources – this is found with popular use of RSS readers to receive content for personal research use. On the Web today, each of these fundamentals drives each other to occur as in a natural phenomenon.

RSS publishing is the Web’s new ad-hoc standard for publishing content. While HTML page growth still occurs on new Web sites, individual RSS content articles are being published at an enormous rate and that rate of growth is accelerating. I’ve seen one statistic mentioning existence of now over 200,000,000 blog sites on the Web and still growing.

The advent and explosion of Web RSS content – whether news articles or blog content causes this new deeper than HTML layer of “Too Much Information”. Each RSS feed represents from one to often several score of “articles” or comments containing content. Now, if you follow one or a mere hand-full of blogs or news sources, you can manage to organize and make use of the content from your chosen content sources (bloggers) or your news sources.

Let’s say you’re part of an organization with needs to focus attention on particular subject knowledge that’s occurring and growing in the world. These organizations are any Professional Association or subject-focused membership group. Examples are: Medical Specialty Colleges, Industry Trade Associations, or maybe company Competitive Intelligence Departments.

The aggregate of Web published content about a particular subject domain represents a knowledge-base about that subject domain. In particular, the newly published portion represents the changes being experienced in that subject world.

If you had a way to telescope into your particular subject knowledge-base available on the Web to organize it, see it just as it changes each day and consume it that would be a way toward managing TMI into Addressable Knowledge.

The World Wide Web has become a powerhouse of information, knowledge and data. Much of it can be very valuable; however, too much of it remains not-useful. It’s hard to argue with the concept the Web has “too much information” or what text users refer to as TMI.

The [...]]]> Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch

The World Wide Web has become a powerhouse of information, knowledge and data. Much of it can be very valuable; however, too much of it remains not-useful. It’s hard to argue with the concept the Web has “too much information” or what text users refer to as TMI.

The phenomenon of the Web is not fully understood and appreciated by many people because our experiences in the early phases of the Web caused us to use and rely on public search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask, to name three.

Public search engines provide us with information retrieval that could not have been imagined in previous time. But, they also inundate us with so much non-relevant information we often consider them useless except for some fundamental research tasks. People easily then extend their feeling of search engine uselessness to the entire Web in general, which I think is an unfortunate outcome.

I believe growth in the use of the World Wide Web for publishing content is similar to the growth of use of automobiles in the early part of the twentieth century. Automobiles could have become considered useful from the very start. However, their use did not spread and become easy for a majority of users until a volume of road systems and services sprang-up. Until that happened the automobile was just for some hobbyists and adventurers.

The really useful days of the Web are ahead of us.

So, today as I set about considering what to write for our blog I came across a news release that really caught my eye, stopped me dead in my tracks and yanked me in its direction:

Job Study – Top Ten Hot Career Trends for [...]]]> Donald Hogan, CEO KnowledgeWatch

So, today as I set about considering what to write for our blog I came across a news release that really caught my eye, stopped me dead in my tracks and yanked me in its direction:

Job Study – Top Ten Hot Career Trends for College Graduates (PRNewswire)

#3 on the list was Data Mining.  The article from the University of California San Diego Extension described this new, hot job as… “Looking for a needle in a haystack is a good analogy for data mining jobs.  “Data mining is the technique of extracting specific types of information or patterns from large databases, such as data warehouses.  “Advanced statistical methods sift through large volumes of data, providing answers to questions that were once too time-consuming. “

A lot of people I know make reference from time to time of our work at KnowledgeWatch as data mining.  Actually we like to think of it more as knowledge mining.  That’s sort of why we, uh, named our company KnowledgeWatch – as in watching for knowledge.  Who’s knowledge?  Well, our customer’s knowledge.  You could call it data mining but that’s technically not accurate because we’re mining a database that’s the really, really big cyber database called the World Wide Web.  We’re mining it not to necessarily answers questions or conclude our own results, we’re finding, aggregating and refining the volume down so that customer knowledge workers can make use of textual articles, or knowledge, in whatever ways they need to – to do their jobs better.  Our marketing folks extend this idea more with our marketing slogan: Powering Innovation.

What we’re mining could be data in a database, but it’s predominately textual (or word) based data that our customers have pointed out as pertinent to their desired subject domains.   So we obtain really relevant and custom knowledge for each customer because we look at places they think will likely hold the most relevant current knowledge for them.   A second step, after we know where to look for that customer, is we help our customer define very, very precisely the kind of articles of knowledge they get “watched for” by our system.  The third step is to do this each and every day, in order to harvest brand new knowledge being published into the world, to quickly gather it and direct it to our customer.

Our typical customer is likely a content manager at a large professional or trade association who’s looking for subject domain knowledge to pass along to hundreds or thousands of member subscribers.  It could also be someone like a sales support competitive intelligence analyst at a corporate enterprise trying to keep up on competitive product knowledge.

So, each day our customer has the opportunity to have their needles in the haystack automatically float up to them so they can enrich the knowledge and the work product of many knowledge workers.

That’s what our knowledge mining does !