Inventures' was formed by the Department of Health as a vehicle
for providing expert consultancy, innovative technology and
solutions to the Health Care Service.
It is a highly distributed company with 30 branches throughout
Britain and the experts in different fields are widely scattered.
Furthermore, it is serving the NHS, one of the largest distrubuted
organisations in the country.
A company like Inventures needs an intranet to provide a clear
communication channel between its staff and they implemented
one in 2001. However, a traditional intranet did not fully meet
their needs. Much of the expert knowledge was still not easily
found because:
- It is stored in long PDF or word documents which are opaque
to traditional search
- It is not published and the relevant expert is not always
known
Exapia is helping to solve this problem by:
- automatically analysing the long, unstructured documents
in which the knowledge is found
- allowing experts to easily attach tags to parts of these
long documents to mark them as relevant to particular areas
of knowledge
- implementing the Exapia Intelligent
Dialogue Manager which automatically posts a query to relevant
experts who it judges should know the answer.
- providing Exapia as a core to the intranet which finds the
sections of the documents and forums relevant to a search
query and automatically categorises and analyses new material
placed on the intranet
