Autonomy Achieves Breakthroughs in Delivering Organizational Knowledge Management
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Autonomy Systems, a company that has pioneered personalisation on the Web, recently outlined three breakthroughs in the development of knowledge management that herald its entry into the fast-growing knowledge management market. Among the breakthroughs claimed is Autonomy's ability to capture 'tacit' knowledge.

Often described as the 'Holy Grail' of knowledge management, tacit knowledge is the term used to refer to knowledge held within people's heads, rather than explicit knowledge stored on computer systems in the form of documents, spreadsheets, emails and corporate databases. Using the Autonomy products, due to be launched in March, companies can, for the first time, automatically identify and exploit the knowledge base of individual employees.

Key to capturing tacit knowledge is the other two breakthroughs the automatic extraction of concepts rather than keywords, and the automatic categorisation of information according to the key concepts it contains.

Richard Gaunt, Autonomy's Co-Founder and Technical Director, stated: "Traditional knowledge management technologies such as document management, Groupware and Intranets, have only pricked the surface of this critical organisational requirement. With this announcement, Autonomy has pushed the barriers of knowledge management technology to a new level."

Gaunt continued: "Autonomy is the first company worldwide to enable organisations to intelligently manage and exploit a company's most valuable corporate asset -- the complete knowledge base of individuals within the enterprise. By automatically tapping into these vast knowledge resources, which often remain untapped in people's heads, the Holy Grail of enterprise-wide knowledge sharing is now made a reality."

Eric Woods, senior analyst at Ovum, observed: "Data warehousing, document management and Intranets are all important technologies in the fast evolving market place of Knowledge Management. The entry of Autonomy Systems into this market provides an innovative perspective on how organisations can define and implement an effective Knowledge Management strategy."

Tacit Knowledge Capture

The combination of Tacit Knowledge and Explicit Knowledge is key to Knowledge Management. The latter can be derived from sources such as: company manuals, memoranda, corporate Intranets, notes, spreadsheets, emails, fax and news feeds. To date, getting access to tacit knowledge has relied solely on employees filling out endless questionnaires. Autonomy's approach, however, is more powerful and totally automatic. Autonomy makes it possible to identify an employee's area of expertise from a personal profile automatically derived from the issues an individual researches, as well as the ideas in the documents and email messages they send and receive. This helps facilitate virtual workgroups, encourages communication and reduces duplication of effort.

Concept Extraction

By applying its Dynamic Reasoning Engine (DRE) to knowledge management, Autonomy is designed to be able to understand concepts and the real meaning of words in their correct context, providing its knowledge management products with an unrivalled level of automation and precision. Most technologies analyse keywords only and fall to recognise the context or meaning of searches.

Autonomy's approach is based on analysing the body of text and identifying key concepts within it, through an understanding of the frequency and relationships of terms that closely correlates with meaning. Once key concepts are identified, they are encoded as "Concept Agents", which can then be employed to look for matches to the concepts they contain in any source of text or to find people with agents that contain similar concepts.

For example, an employee may want to find cut about Electronic Commerce and selling products over the Internet. Initiating a query would deliver information on the subject from a variety of sources, which might include an email, an employee with relevant experience, a company memo, an analyst report or a variety of company documents on the subject.

Automatic Categorisation

The third principle relates to the automatic sorting and categorisation of information using these "Concept Agents". Once a company deploys Autonomy's technology, all the knowledge held on computer systems can be automatically categorised by the core engine without the labour intensive and expensive process currently used, where every single piece of information needs to be read and then tagged manually. For example, to manually index 10,000 documents could take more than 8 week;, Autonomy can achieve this automatically within minutes resulting in a huge reduction in administrative costs while ensuring a greater degree of accuracy and flexibility.

Dynamic Reasoning Engine (DRE)

At the heart of Autonomy's approach is its Dynamic Reasoning Engine (DRE). The DRE is based on neural-network pattern matching technology originally developed by Autonomy's parent company, Neurodynamics, which has been deploying the technology in large-scale defense applications since 1991.

Autonomy Systems plans to announce its first Knowledge Management products to the corporate marketplace by the end of March 1998. The central components of the product offering will be the Knowledge Server and Knowledge Update.

About Autonomy Corporation plc

Autonomy's European headquarters is situated in Cambridge. Dr. Michael Lynch, an internationally renowned expert in the field of adaptive pattern recognition, founded the company in March 1996. Lynch has recently been awarded the Institute of Electrical Engineers' medal for outstanding achievement Autonomy's products are based on core technology developed over the past six years by Neurodynamics, a leader in the commercial application of neural network and pattern recognition technologies.

Autonomy Inc. is a privately held company with U.S. offices in San Francisco, California and Roseland, New Jersey. Autonomy can be found on the Internet at http://www.agentware.com