Sue Feldman has been a key analyst and researcher in the search space for a number of years. Her work at IDC as Vice President of Research, Search and Digital Marketplace is very highly regarded. (Sometimes I envy her job!) It's Wednesday morning in sunny San Jose, and Sue has just given the morning's keynote at the Enterprise Search Summit West.

Sue believes that we are seeing a convergence of tools in search, and thankfully the vendors are seeing a stronger market, which will motivate them to keep innovating. The future of search is not a platform based on transactions, as we have today. It will be a language-based foundation for a new platform - a knowledge platform that she predicts will gain equal place with transaction-based systems. The similarities with the evolution of the database platforms imply a parallel path.

We will continue to see development in categorization, text analytics and linguistic modules. This includes capabilities for identifying parts of speech; extracting entities, concepts, relationships, sentiment and geo-location; semantic understanding via dictionaries and taxonomies; support for multiple languages. One of the biggest problems Sue thinks we need to solve for in the search market is something taught to every library school student: selection. There is so much information, from so many sources - what can you trust? What are the valuable sources?

What are the market drivers? New business requirements. Updated business requirements. Connect the right information to the right people at the right time. We've heard that for years, and while it may be annoying, it's still valid! Determining the state of the business despite the data being in separate silos. Compliance - governments create and change those requirements regularly! Controlling costs - think information workers and call centers; the faster a service rep can find information and finish the call, the lower the per call cost and the more calls they can take, translating to happier, more loyal customers and the next driver: increased revenue. In keeping with "Web 2.0" a better understanding of customers and improved communications with them are a key driver.

eCommerce will require ever more sophisticated tools in the search digital media space, as will publishers as they continue to migrate online. The digital marketplace and government (DoD, NIH) have been early investors in this space - for ad matching, interaction improvements, rich media search, fraud and terrorist detection, access to information and more. The market, according to Sue, is realizing that they have tons of information NOT in their ERP and CRM systems. Transaction-based computing is no longer enough. User-centered computing requires re-thinking, new human-computer interaction models.

Sue believes we need to automate knowledge work, as we no longer are limited to working 40 hours a week in our offices - we work in bits, here and there, 24/7 on multiple devices in many formats. We need to have personalized interaction models - and even more granular that just at the individual level, at the person's role level - employee, volunteer, family, friend. The personalization needs to address the user, the device, and the context. It needs to be flexible and adaptable, ad hoc in real time. It needs to be secure and contiguous across user environments.

The challenges for search are:

• How to unify access to kinds of information from a single, contextual user interface
• Improving human-computer interaction models
• Identifying what is good in interaction design for information access

Sue believes that she will not have a market to forecast in 10 years. By then search will be embedded in the platform and in the applications to provide interaction. Applications will use this search platform to personalize, filter and visualize. We will see task-specific applications in our work environments. In fact, some of these applications are already on the market. Search will be at the center of interactive computing, as search is now language-based, just as humans.

Like Daniela, I too am attending the 2008 KMWorld/Enterprise Search Summit West/Taxonomy Boot Camp meta-conference in San Jose. Shortly before lunch, we heard from Gary Szukalski, Vice President, Customer Relations, Autonomy. He spoke about Meaning-Based Computing. I've known Gary for a number of years and he did not disappoint - his message becomes more refined each time I see him speak.

Gary spoke of a "major paradigm shift" in the the IT industry. For years, we (IT practitioners and vendors) have been forced, unnaturally, to aggregate, dumb-down, and structure the mess of unstructured data that makes up approximately 80% of an organization's information assets. Why have we done this? Because that's how computers work - they need structure. We are moving into a world where we can stop forcing structure onto data as computers will understand the semantics of what they are storing and indexing.

Now, he didn't say semantic web or semantic technologies. :) He talked about meaning - how do we teach our machines to disambiguate terms. He gave an Enron example - "shred" means destroy paper documents, but also refers to slicing vegetables in the Enron corpus. It also is a snowboarding reference. How does the machine know? This is where Autonomy is heading.

Why would we care? Gary spoke of the December 2007 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In a nutshell, these amendments made all relevant electronic information admissible in a legal case. There are definite ROI measures to be had for using the right discovery tools to protect organizations from legal troubles. This brought to my mind the Sedona Principles as well - legal guidelines regarding the importance of metadata.

Pan-enterprise search is the new buzzword. Rather than aggregating - federating - sources together, a search tool should now be able to index ALL objects, regardless of file or storage type. Glad to hear a top ES vendor saying that finally!

Now, I was a big Verity customer/user at a prior employer. I gave them a great deal of feedback on their tools. One thing that always gnawed at me, born from my library roots, was that the definitions of the categories and topics that improved search relevance were locked in the tools. My organization defined them, but we couldn't share them easily - only the evidence of their existence, by means of better search results and faceted browsing. But the critical thing about "meaning" is that it be shared! In the "shred" example above, I understood fully it's importance in the Enron context. But my first thought on hearing the word was cooking, while the woman next to me thought of snowboarding. How does an organization use the power of the tool to educate the users of the tool? Who is working on the UI part of this paradigm shift? And who is thinking about the UI in the context of information security? Secure search should provide access at the role, group, organization or public level. Is Autonomy using open standards to minimize efforts at integrating metadata pan-enterprise? For me pan-enterprise is not just behind the firewall, it extends onto the web in the form of corporate messaging and consumer feedback. Are any of the enterprise search vendors using open methods to allow this kind of integration? I'm interested in hearing, as I left the search world behind a couple of years ago, and have drifted towards the outer edges of the space.

This was one of the better presentations this morning, and I hope they post the slides somewhere soon!