R&D
Fujitsu Business Information Navigation Technology

How well do you know your business? Knowledge management is critical for an organization's ability to generate value from its knowledge-based assets. It's also key for innovation and competitiveness. But as companies grow, technology evolves and information proliferates, the task of making the best use of intelligence and talent becomes increasingly complex. To meet that challenge, Fujitsu's business information navigation technology harnesses the power of next-generation Web technology to allow users to quickly find the right experts for any given project or discover unseen relationships among clients.

Business information navigation technology combines concepts like text mining with online social networking. It applies the technology behind the Semantic Web, an expansion of the current Web in which information is given specific meaning, to mine intranets and databases for fast solutions. It allows companies to easily find specialists on staff and relationships between them because massive, detailed profiles about them can be semi-automatically generated as meta data from their day-to-day online activities. Business information navigation technology can map staff networks with the right experience for business projects and negotiations, integrate customer information from an internal sales force database for more effective risk management.

"Say you are looking for people with experience in Java development," says Kunio Matsui of Fujitsu's Intelligent Systems Laboratory. (Interview date: June 15th, 2005) "You'll be able to find them easily using the technology we've developed. It can be time-consuming to manually enter each person's experience into the system, so it semi-automatically incorporates data from daily work documents such as schedules and technical reports into the search database."

Given a search keyword, the KnowWho part of the navigator can graphically represent the strength of network connections among people or departments in a large company, giving the user a fast snapshot of a "skill map" related to a given topic. Who to contact about what, or who to put on a task force for an urgent project is quick and simple. The names of people with greater skill in a given field are also displayed more brightly on the map. Ubiquitous, instant and reliable VoIP communication to mapped targets is also possible through the system.

Staff knowledge management at companies with more than a thousand employees would likely benefit from Fujitsu's business information navigation technology. But it can also be put to work on customer relations and sales force management by integrating data from heterogeneous systems and deriving relationships among them, allowing the user to learn something new from existing data pools. Furthermore, the concept can be applied to fields as disparate as banking and medicine.

"Banks have a number of separate internal databases tracking things like account transfers and customer loan information," says Matsui. "The system can integrate these different types of business data and can be used for things like identification of risky loan clients by banks."

If your doctor's away and there's an emergency, a hospital could tap the doctor's network of affiliated medical workers for help, adds Matsui. Finding a good lawyer for a legal case is another possibility.

Three strengths make Fujitsu's business information navigation technology stand out: it can process natural language, it features a super-fast search engine using XML and Resource Description Framework specifications, and it incorporates OKAR, or Ontology for Knowledge Activity Resources, an open-source, cross-platform format describing knowledge activity information. OKAR can collect data from e-mails and other text as well as digital cameras and printers. It converts these to RDF specifications and integrates them as metadata that can be mined as KnowWho, Web calendars or other formats. For instance, it can run a keyword search of a report discussed at a meeting, find the attendees and scan their profiles in an employee database for common threads. The result? Knowing your business or customers better is as simple as doing a keyword search.

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