Verity Inc. this week will unfurl an updated version of its K2 Developer platform that infuses applications such as content management, CRM, ERP, and portals with search, organization, and personalization capabilities.
Giving software vendors the tools to embed core content organization capabilities into applications is a key step toward achieving a common search experience for information distributed across the enterprise, said Andy Feit, vice president of product marketing at Verity, based in Sunnyvale, Calif.
“In the enterprise there is an explosion of information, but it is in a number of locations – inside databases, CRM systems,” and content management systems, Feit said. “Knowing where to look and being able deal with it consistently is vital.”
New in Version 5.0 of K2 Developer is the Verity Organization Developer’s Kit, a set of modular APIs that can be easily integrated into applications, Verity officials said. The kit is designed to allow developers to add automatic classification, business rules, thematic mapping, and recommendation capabilities to apps, which in turn helps end-users uncover needed information faster.
K2 Developer 5.0 also adds a beefed up Recommendation Engine, which lets an application recommend documents, categories, or experts from multiple content repositories. New features include federated recommendation, which gives users suggested documents from internal and external applications and content stores, and Dynamic Taxonomies, which lets the system analyze and recommend related categories.
In the past year, search technology has expanded its role to include categorization, taxonomy generation, and tagging, according to Laura Ramos, analyst at Forrester Research Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif.
“This is a natural progression of what search is. (It is) not just about Boolean keyword searches, but the thematic matching of documents to other documents,” Ramos said. “Originally it was keyword search and now it is (about) relevance by concepts or themes. This gives users more options for how they can return, display, and navigate content.”