Status: Revised document post face-to-face meeting of Jan 14-15
Version: January 28, 2002
This search might be initiated by a client's expressed interest in a particular technology. A typical problem in this context is that the salesperson does not share terminology with the technical people who may have written such an article. So keyword search will often be inadequate. Similarly, a technical domain taxonomy will be of little use if the salesperson is unfamiliar with the domain.
Just within the sales collatoral taxonomy, EDS supports more than 150 formal offerings, each of which will be customized to the particular clients needs. Many of these are gigantic umbrellas, e.g. Supply Chain Management, that cover a wide range of more specific capabilities. This is one reason this kind of sales information is not normally obtained off the intranet, but through an existing network of trusted contacts that is capable of identifying someone who knows.
In this area a taxonomic organization of documents by content might be useful. More useful would be multiple taxonomies, since the most complex problems tend to span multiple disciplines.
One aspect of a large service organization is that it may have a very broad set of capabilities. But when pursuing large contracts these capabilities sometimes need to be assembled in new ways. There will often be no previous single matching project. A challenge is to reason about how past templates and documents can be reassembled in new configurations, while satisfying a diverse set of preconditions.
Consider a past project identifed as matching a needed sub-component of some new effort. Very simple data, like how long it took and what sort of personnel were required to bring it off successfully can be invaluable. With luck, solution descriptions include:
Internal Resources
What we sell
Sales help
Sales practices
Technical review of proposals
...
Virtual Support Center
Proposal Warehouse
Numerous proposals by name, client and client industry.
...
...
Marketplace
Clients
Client Information Repository
Client Detail
...
...
There are multiple places to find information about how we do things, work we have performed and about the clients we have performed it for. Keyword search is sometimes adequate. But when it is not, this single taxonomy can be difficult to navigate to the most useful document.
It is important to note that numerous large ontologies are being constructed today for use across the web. They are XML based and their semantic content is defined by shared use. The complex project plans that have been left in our repository will eventually be described using some standard, XML-based workflow vocabulary. Simple OWL assertions regarding the components of this flow would mean that a broad range of tools could reason about aspects of these plans without having to support a complete cability to interpret the workflow dialect. At a minimum , this would seem to require support of XML structures as literals. More useful would be the integration of XPATH style references into the literal space of OWL so that we could make formal descriptive statements about sub-elements of XML structures.