The first thing to learn is that not all knowledge management methods or document classification systems are alike. Some lean towards complete automation, using "neural network" technology after first being "seeded" or "trained" by a first batch of documents. Autonomy is one well known leader in this area. At the other end of the spectrum, according to Standley, many companies have a document submission template to allow new documents to be integrated by employees into the content management system. But in practice what tends to happen is that employees who are pressed for time or uninterested in categorization leave most fields blank, leaving an unclassified mess in their wake.

Portal Maximizer attempts to build a bridge that automatically adds needed metadata (such as author name, document type, or whatever customized classification is desired by the particular company in question) to the document by analysing the content of the document as it is entered into the system. Some human oversight is still injected into the process, as the submitter can quickly vet the contents of the fields before adding the document to the system.

Unlike many automated solutions, Portal Maximizer is customizable. The linguistic rules and statistical elements of the search and classification technology can be adjusted to "bias the system" as desired or to hone in on specific vocabularies that might be particularly germane to a company's operations. Other search technology companies which use similar "linguistic/grammatical" analysis of documents includeSemio and Inxight.

The demo I looked at was impressive. I found myself thinking "now there's some active navigation!" In one application, an online news site such as C|NET, the product does a good job of narrowing searches and "hard wiring" specific related searches such as people, companies, etc. So an initial search for Microsoft can be whittled down to a list of just a few documents on the antitrust case or Larry Ellison's comments about Microsoft, if that's what you happen to be looking for, in just a couple of clicks.

What is really cool, and also totally automated, is the insertion of additional context links into news articles "on the fly." If the portal has a fair bit of content related to a technical term or company name, this link is automatically added to a news story when the document is analysed by Portal Maximizer. These context links lead readers to additional information, and the beauty of it is, the authors of documents or technical staff do not have to spend time painstakingly building in links to relevant related information - Portal Maximizer builds them right into the documents as it works seamlessly with the content management system. Such technologies are implemented today on major portals such as Yahoo, but seemingly only on a limited basis, such as the automatic addition of company information links for company names or stock ticker symbols.

The real power of the contextual links and the ability to classify highly topical information was illustrated through a walkthrough of one of their customers' web sites - a special publication about fighter planes called Jane's. The Jane's site is a heavy-duty knowledge base about fighter planes and the technology of their various components, enhanced with a judicious use of flash. It was plane to see that the contextual links inserted by Portal Maximizer really helped the process of understanding the history and technology of these wonders of the world of aviation. Mr. Standley emphasized that the whole project, which required the classification of 45,000 documents, took Active Navigation only three weeks to implement.

It's clear that the product works well. The technology underlying this smooth functioning is a bit hard to digest for the layman, of course. One approach that Active Navigation takes to increasing search relevance is to create multiple indices of documents broken down by topic. When it's clear that someone is searching in a given topic area (or if their security level only allows them to see some documents or parts of documents), indices can be "activated and deactivated" as needed to ensure maximum relevance. In other words, there's some muscle under the hood.

Portal Maximizer is priced at about $75,000 - a tiny fraction of what you'd pay for a fighter plane.

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