Darmstadt (GER), January 2008 - Structured corporate knowledge has many advantages: An effective search for information enables the staff to cope better with tasks, to realize new ideas in a shorter time, and to direct decisions more precisely. However, the preparation, structuring, and evaluation of the information compiled in the enterprise takes a lot of time and effort, and the retrieval of relevant data is also difficult. A new application called ConWeaver enables firms to fight their way through the information jungle and has already been successfully used in many real-worlds scenarios.
ConWeaver was developed by scientists from Germany's renowned Fraunhofer Institute in the framework of an industrial project Following the application's corporate success, ConWeaver GmbH was founded as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD in October, 2007.
A valuable source for the productivity of an enterprise is knowledge, which serves to advance processes, optimize the performance, and reduce the costs. Knowledge enables the staff to perform market analyses, to recognize gaps in supplies, and, as a consequence, to open up new markets. Enterprises realized this very early in the information age, but how do German companies manage their knowledge?
According to the 540 respondents of a survey undertaken by the Fraunhofer Knowledge Management Community at the beginning of this year, many executives are not satisfied with their in-house knowledge management: they feel a need to counteract the state of disorientation in their own information flood.
This was exactly the objective of the Fraunhofer researchers when they started to develop the ConWeaver program. The main idea was the vision to create a semantic network of information and to facilitate the retrieval of important data using structured result lists.
There are other approaches in the field of information acquisition and knowledge representation, but most of these software concepts require very extensive data maintenance, they provide unstructured results, do not recognize synonyms nor translations, or they are not able to do logic operations between different data sources. The main problem of most of the internal information systems is inadequate interfaces between different databases having the heterogeneous company know-how stored in quite different ways.
The Fraunhofer software, however, allows - in a largely automated manner - the extraction and interlinkage of knowledge from most diverse databases. "A search and representation of the results structured in terms of content is the main benefit that ConWeaver offers compared to other systems", explains Dr. Thomas Kamps, project manager at Fraunhofer IGD.
By means of configurable analysis workflows with modules that are selected from a modular system, a multilingual knowledge network is automatically generated from the customer data. Stored in standard databases, the knowledge network serves as a basis for the customized semantic search solution. This provides each enterprise with an individual knowledge network that automatically adapts to changed data situations at regular intervals.
Having successfully finished the project, the software was put on the market. Due to the increasing demand for structured company information and the great demand from German companies, the project manager, Thomas Kamps, and the ConWeaver developer, Richard Stenzel, founded the ConWeaver GmbH as a spin-off of Fraunhofer IGD.
