Letting Corporate Data Speak for Itself: Xconomy

I came across an article on;Digital Reef;that I think has some excellent points.

Here is an excerpt:

“…it turns out that Digital Reef has built something fairly new and interesting, a “similarity search engine” for big corporate networks that can start with one document—say, a Word or Excel file—and find others that resemble it.

That could be very useful if, for instance, you were a compliance officer at a big health plan and you wanted to see whether any of your employees had unsecured patient records sitting around on their laptop hard drives (which would be a big violation of federal healthcare privacy regulations). Just plop an example of a patient record into the Digital Reef system, and it will scour the network for other examples. Or say you were a lawyer at a big firm writing a brief in an employment case and you wanted to find out whether any of your colleagues working on similar cases in the past had already assembled the relevant citations. You could simply submit your entire draft to Digital Reef, and see what washed up.”

The author, Wade Roush does an excellent job of explaining the value of the Digital Reef similarity engine. ;He cites two examples but the possibilities are numerous. ;The power of similarity helps with discovery, compliance, efficient workflow, research, analysis, etc.

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/03/03/digital-reefs-similarity-based-search-helps-corporate-data-speak-for-itself/