Archive for the ‘Information Overload’ Category

Key phrases are all about being informative!

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
 
A key phrase is defined as a meaningful and significant expression consisting of one or more words in a document. For example a keyword "information" is very general while phrases "information overload" and further "information overload syndrome" provide much better understanding.
 
Appropriately, key phrases serve as a highly condensed summary for a document, and they are used as contextual labels to supplement the title or they can be highlighted within the body of the document to facilitate users’ fast browsing and reading.
 
Key phrases are usually manually assigned by authors, especially for journals,  conference articles or back-of-the book indexes.  However, the vast majority of documents such as news, magazine articles, web pages do not provide key phrases because the manual effort of assigning key phrases is too expensive. Therefore it is useful to automatically extract key phrases from web pages to accompany the main content of the document.
  
Key phrases are all about being informative!
 
Informativeness tells us how well a phrase captures or illustrates the key ideas.  Practice shows that users prefer using key phrases in their searches because they are getting more accurate results.
 
Because informativeness depends on the background information - the context - the more context we have  the better is our understanding.
 
Context plays crucial role in rapid information analysis and synthesis. Software tools, such as Context Organizer,  that specialize in spotlighting the key phrases provide a convenient shorthand for researchers and writers.
 
Context Organizer immediately focuses on the essential information and helps with rapid reviews of large number of documents in short time. Quick reviews of the key phrases with relevant context provide practical clues as to the usefulness of the information.

 

 

 * This mind map was produced using Context Organizer for MindManager

Context Organizer is available in English, French, German and Spanish.
 
See Context Organizer with MindManager and with Google search.
 
Download Context Organizer for free today
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We Cannot Have Too Much Information

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
 
We are used to looking at information in a linear way. Typically when we read web pages and documents we are like hunters trying to spot the most valuable information that is hidden in the text.
 
Our mind directs us to filter information until we find the relevant pearls of wisdom we are searching for. The sifting through vast reams of content is not efficient and mostly tedious.
 
So the question is: what if we had an ability to quickly access the content according to our wishes? This could mean that  we could directly ask a retrieval system what we need and the system would give us relevant choices.
 
For example, if we were interested in a specific topic, the search would provide a rich selection of relevant summaries - not links only - directly pertaining to our interests.
 
So instead of getting a long list of links to documents containing our search term we would get a handy list of the most important excerpts! And all this without the need to analyze each link.
 
This way of using content makes a huge difference. Instead of being crushed by too much information to analyze, we have direct access only to information that is of immediate interest to us. No more we need to spend time on fruitless sifting and sorting. Instead we get the relevant information directly.
 
How this is possible? By organizing and indexing information according to the summaries. Very much similar to the way we used to access information using the back-of-the-book index. Only now we can build a web-based back-of-the-book index that serves as an intelligent shortcut to getting desired information quickly and accurately.

 

 * This mind map was produced using Comapping online collaborative mapping software with Context Organizer automatic summarization.

 
For more information contact us at sales@contextdiscovery.com
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Context Organizer Web server - a high performance text mining hub

Monday, April 12th, 2010

 

As much as over 80% of the daily decisions are based on mainly unstructured information coming from search engines, websites, emails, corporate documents, press and media information, competitor information.
 
The amount of corporate information doubles every three months, which
increases the need for implementing efficient and powerful text mining tools.
 
Context Organizer Web server offers a high performance text mining hub to support knowledge management and competitive intelligence. The product is easily customized for workgroups and individuals.
 
Context Organizer Web server can be easily integrated into a company’s intranet, where it works as the central hub for managing both internal and external information streams.
 
Context Organizer Web server can also be a hosted solution accessed via a web interface and thus does not require any software installation on the customer’s own server.
 
Information can be provided from many different types of internal and external sources: websites, newsfeeds, email, file servers, and databases. Users can publish and store information either through email or a web-based interface to automatically feed it into their own systems.
 
Context Organizer Web server is a flexible and modular tool that can suit the needs of both small and large organizations. Compared to many other software packages, it has a high price/performance ratio.
 
How does it work?
 
Context Organizer Web server is a software product that can:
     rapidly summarize large amounts of information
     structure the information according to a customized XML format
     present the summarized information in a user-friendly way to many different users based on their profiles
     store the keywords and contextual summaries in your corporate knowledge index to provide rapid access to any corporate information
     deliver the summaries as mind maps such as Mindjet MindManager or Comapping
 
 
Context Organizer Web is highly scalable and users can choose to start with building only the knowledge index for specific projects or for monitoring specific information sources before deploying it globally.
 
The system can also be integrated with different business systems, such as Contents Management, Knowledge Management, ERP, CRM, and other similar types of systems.
 
Context Organizer Web is particularly well suited to summarize the results from search engines, RSSs, wide variety of subscription sources, blogs, and news feeds.  

 

 * This mind map was produced using Comapping online collaborative mapping software with Context Organizer automatic summarization.

Try Context Organizer summarization power and get the essential facts at a glance. Instantly.

 Download and try out Context Organizer for free today.

 Sign up for Comapping for free today

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What can you do with Context Organizer?

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

 

As we all know, the home page is "the most valuable real estate in the world" according to the usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

The homepage is your company’s face to the world. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website’s business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment.

 

So I took another look at the Context Discovery home page. Certainly you can find there a lot of valuable information and links but reading requires to pay attention. And attention nowadays is at premium.

So I decided to use Comapping, a mind mapping tool, that uses also Context Organizer - the summarization tool that we highly recommend - and present the information visually.

So here is the mind map telling what Context Organizer does together with the links to the demos showing the tremendous value of summarization in the age of information wealth.  

 Any comments are greatly appreciated.

 

* This mind map was produced using Comapping online collaborative mapping software with Context Organizer automatic summarization.

 See Context Organizer summarization power and get the essential facts at a glance. Instantly.

 Download and try out Context Organizer for free today.

Sign up for Comapping for free today

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Treat any Web page like a Twitter summary

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

 

We live online where immediacy, brevity and speed are of great value when we interact with the World.  For example, what do we most love about Twitter?

The speed with which Twitter allows for a fast and easy sharing using no more than 140 characters to tell the entire story: beginning, middle and the end.
 
Brevity helps with getting to the point. Twitter is the ultimate summarization media. Tell your great idea and point me to some page. And if I’m interested in the detail I’ll go there and even tell other people about it. I will re-Twitt. What a caring treatment of the reader’s time!
 
Brevity promptly reveals the essence. So what can we do with the non-Twitter media where we are faced with long stories….much longer than the 140 characters on Twitter.

The answer is that we can summarize web pages and documents. And when the keywords and the key sentences pop up we instantly see the focus of the page. Very much like in the Twitter message.

See Brian Friedlander’s demo on how Context Organizer summarizes Google searches:

 

 Try Context Organizer summarization power and treat any Web page like a Twitter summary.

 Download and try out Context Organizer for free today

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Contextualizing now integrated with Comapping

Monday, February 15th, 2010

 

Hypershiter, visual mapper and a blogger Wallace Tait writes about adding context to mind mapping. The point in case is the recent integration of Context Organizer with Comapping. Wallace writes:

The point of extracting context from Web Pages and documents is quite simple; we are overloaded with data, information and knowledge and we need to get to the point of the barrage of data that attacks us daily.

For the academic, the use of Comapping with Contextual Organizer will be invaluable, as the cloud gives you the ideal medium for creating, managing and sharing information and knowledge with your colleagues and students within a protected cloud space.

For the business user Comapping can become a very convenient information carrier and knowledge mapping tool; becoming a standard process and system tool for creating all relevant information associated with your business management system.

The addition of Contextual Organizer now gives you the ability to research Web Pages. With the insertion of a URL you’ll be offered an “Analyze” button and voila, the Contextual engine which uses the Amazon server extracts the contextual relevance for your research purposes.

 

 * This mind map was produced using Comapping online collaborative mapping software with Context Organizer Analyze auto-mapping add-on.

Download and try out Comapping for free today

Download and try out Context Organizer for free today

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62 percent of professionals report sifting through irrelevant information

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

 

New Work and New Work Skills by Tony Karrer

1-Sentence Summary* 

A recently released Workplace Productivity Survey, reported by MSNBC, had the following findings: 62 percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need;    
             
68 percent wish they could spend less time organizing information and more time using the information that comes their way.
 
Indeed, the key in dealing with volumes of data is to be able to select smartly what in fact is relevant and useful versus fluff.
 
One of the technologies that helps with weeding out irrelevant information is automatic text summarization. Summarization is kind of speed-up reading  condensing web pages, emails and documents into keywords and summaries presented in context.
 
By pointing to the most important content, it allows the readers to make quick determinations if they want to read the full text.

 * 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer.

 Download Context Organizer today.

  

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Go on High-Information Diet

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Go on High-Information Diet by Dustin Wax

1-Sentence Summary* 

The phrase information overload” gets more than 1.5 million hits on Google. Listen: in order to be information, an input must make you better informed. We are a nation of people who constantly react to the various inputs in our lives in the absence of information.

The fact that Google brings a huge list of links to follow can be an advantage but only if you have some tools that will help to rapidly summarize the essential content. The key in dealing with volumes of data is to be able to select smartly what in fact is concrete and useful versus fluff.

One of the technologies that may help is automatic text summarization. It speed-up reading by condensing web pages, emails and documents into keywords and summaries presented in context. By pointing to the most important content, it allows the reader to make quick determinations if they want to read the full text.

* 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer.

Download Context Organizer today.

 

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Mind mapping as a tool to frame a problem

Friday, October 10th, 2008

 Information Overload Is a Filter Problem by Stephen E. Arnold

"The final issue I have is that I don’t have an answer to this question: “When I don’t know what I need to answer my question, what do I filter in and out?”
 
Indeed, this is a critical question that kick starts the thinking process. A good starting point is to map out the problem and identify as many attributes and components of the question.
 
Mind mapping facilitates identification and organization of complex ideas into clearly defined concepts and ideas. Using mind mapping tools helps immensely to portray the problem by using keywords, short phrases, and pictures which all are interconnected.
 
The strength of this approach is its simplicity. Through associative thinking, brainstorming, any problem will reveal links with relevant concepts and relationships. In fact, visually mapping a problem serves as an effective filter to frame the issues and validate understanding of the problem. Once this is done it is much easier to search for answers.
 
 
Download Context Organizer today.
 
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Information overload is a misnomer

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Using “R&D” Projects to Stop Information Overload by Andre Kibbe

1-Sentence Summary*

Anyone afflicted with information overload is preoccupied with information’s value rather than its relevance.

But when you’re engaged in a research project, begin with the end in mind and ask yourself from moment to moment, “What problem am I trying to solve?”, and confine yourself to looking up information that solves your immediate problem.

 

I may add that equally important is to evaluate your progress along the way. If you can review your goals systematically you’re that much better off. It boils down to keeping your objectives sharply focused in your mind and constantly prioritizing your information needs.  

 * 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer.

Download Context Organizer today.

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