Innovatia’s Content Management Idea

Companies struggling to corral the overwhelming amount of data that goes into product design and manufacturing might find relief from Innovatia Inc. The Bell Aliant subsidiary is working with the University of New Brunswick’s (UNB) Faculty of Computer Science on a "single source information authoring and management solution." The project aims to funnel information required for technical documentation, training materials and marketing tools into one data repository, so everyone working on a new product is also working with the same information. It’s a tall order, says Blair Morgan, Innovatia’s director of research and development, speaking from his St. John NB office. The system must account for two sides of a tricky equation: the people who use information to create products and supporting documentation; and those who use the results of those endeavours.Each group informs the other – technical documentation specialists rely on data from R&D engineers, while e-learning course creators borrow from technical documents, for instance – but the departments work in silos, essentially rewriting data to suit their own needs. That’s not especially efficient."Our proposal is that you design that information, understand what the needs are, all the way through the lifecycle; create it once, but create it in a modular format," Morgan says.He points out that the concept goes beyond product development procedures. "It’s also a toolkit. And one part of the toolkit is a better search engine. We’ve been working with some folks at UNB who’ve done their masters theses on semantic searching."Semantic searching incorporates context into the search function. It understands not only what the searcher seeks, but also who she is and what role she plays the organization. With so rich a frame of reference, the search engine doles up data appropriately.Although many organizations are researching semantic search functionality, it’s no easy thing to make. And it’s just one part of Innovatia’s grand single-authoring plan. According to Morgan, it will take years – until 2010 – to turn this idea into a reality.At that point his company will use the engine for its own purposes, but it might not rule out sharing the technology. "Our initial plan is to give Innovatia an advantage in the market, but…throughout the lifecycle of the development, we expect we’ll be approached by other companies that want to do this themselves and learn from us. There’s a possibility we would offer the methodologies, procedures and toolkit to them."Specializing in technical documentation, training and support for high-tech companies, Innovatia might be just the right company to tackle this big task. But the firm is not working alone: aside from the help from the UNB, Innovatia has collected $2.8 million from the Atlantic Innovation Fund for this project. The AIF is a federal government program designed to strengthen Atlantic Canada’s knowledge-based industry.

Innovatia’s Content Management Idea

News | March 1, 2007

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