Improving Information Access for a Community of Practice Using Business Process as Context

This paper addresses the important problem of finding relevant information in the context of a business process. It presents an information access solution called EIL (enterprise information leverage) which combines information extraction and semantic search to support information needs of professionals selling IT services. EIL leverages structured and unstructured data using novel architecture and special purpose algorithms. Our approach is to organize information around business activities (e.g. a sale), and the system supports semantic concept based information retrieval by utilizing both database query and document search where the relevant business activities act as a contextual constraint. We experimentally show that this approach is promising for reducing noise in search results. EIL is currently under pilot deployment in one of the IBM services sales units.