Jinfo: InfoNgen: Tailored Discovery & Distribution

InfoNgen: Tailored Discovery & Distribution
Jinfo Blog

17th December 2013

Abstract

InfoNgen can be an invaluable tool for enabling workflow automation, finds Yulia Aspinall. The discovery engine combines the ability to metasearch all or selected internal and external sources of information with flexible tagging and the ability to add or change taxonomies to meet customer-specific requirements. InfoNgen's content discovery capabilities are used by clients primarily in the corporate, legal, and financial markets and holding a wide range of job titles, including competitive intelligence and information professionals.

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In the modern commercial world, information can be viewed as a commodity. Organisations who manage to get hold of "golden nuggets" of information first are more likely to gain competitive advantages over their rivals. But in panning for those gold nuggets, researchers may need to filter through whole rivers of information before they strike it lucky. And even when those gold nuggets are found, it's important not to be caught out and confuse them with "fool's gold".

Traditional search engines are quite good at finding the specific words or phrases, but they’re generally unable to distinguish between words that might have different meanings in different contexts, and don’t necessarily select websites are reliable and relevant to the search.

Flexible Tagging

Federated search engines are much more sophisticated and can search across internal and external sources of information, but can be costly and difficult to manage. An alternative is the so-called “discovery engine”. These combine the ability to metasearch all or selected internal and external sources of information with flexible tagging and the ability to add or change taxonomies to meet customer-specific requirements. InfoNgen is an example of this category.

Tailored Taxonomies

InfoNgen (pronounced "Info-Engine") is described by the provider as "a discovery engine which extracts relevant and timely information buried on the web, within emails, social media, local and cloud-based content repositories identifying associated topics, trends and sentiments".

It combines custom taxonomy development with web crawling, internal files and email classification, newsletter and feed publication, and content trend analysis. The foundation of InfoNgen is an automated classification system that analyses unstructured content and organises it into a variety of taxonomies, making it easier to manage.

The platform monitors over 70,000 reliable internet sources, including non-English. The system can apply tags in eight languages and translate stories into English.

Powerful Analysis

Monitoring and extracting the relevant information from internal and external content is only one side of the story, however – the other, equally important, is analysis and distribution.

Trend analysis embedded in the InfoNgen platform helps to identify patterns in the occurrence of specified tags, enabling users to discover connections between companies and topics that might not otherwise be obvious.

Alerts & Custom Newsletters

InfoNgen alerts and newsletter features are easy to use and manage. In addition, users can view, delete or re-send already created alerts or published newsletters.

The platform features a self-service portal (SSP), which, after registering, allows users on an internal network to see a list of all the newsletters and alerts that have been created and made available. They can then add or remove themselves from existing alerts and newsletters.

This feature gives end-users more flexibility in the types of alerts or newsletters they receive. It also helps to promote services that the library or marketing departments may be offering.

Eliminating the Manual & Increasing Productivity

Whether you call InfoNgen and similar platforms discovery engines, news aggregators, or listening platforms, these resources are invaluable tools for enabling workflow automation. They can save researchers huge amounts of time by eliminating most of the tedious manual process of searching through multiple sources, reading them, cutting/pasting/emailing, aggregating them together, formatting, and publishing. In doing so, they make workflow faster, more efficient and productive.

Full Review

The full FreePint Report: Product Review of InfoNgen is now available to those with a FreePint Subscription.

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Editor's Note: Next-Gen Competitive Intelligence

Readers interested in this InfoNgen review may wish to look out for FreePint's upcoming Topic Series: Next-Gen Competitive Intelligence which will emphasise product reviews, but also include case studies and expert tips on making the most of evolving technology to conduct competitive intelligence. Dates are to be decided but publication will be in 2014.

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