Learning from the World Wide Web: Using Organizational Profiles in Information Searches

The World Wide Web provides access to a great deal of information on a vast array of subjects. Individuals search the Web as part of their organizational responsibilities to keep informed and to help solve business problems. These searches for information are accomplished by selecting a Web search engine and developing a keyword query. Keyword queries tend to return many irrelevant hits and typically each search is conducted independently of queries preformed at an earlier date or queries preformed by others. The searches have no organizational context beyond the personal knowledge of the searcher. This lack of organizational context limits the ability of the search to use the experience of other searches and does not contribute to organizational learning. Presented in this paper is an architecture for query construction and results refinement using organizational experience and knowledge. A searcher initially designs a Web query with assistance from an organizational thesaurus and previously constructed queries. After the query has returned results, organizational historical knowledge on source quality assists in determining sufficient quality results to assist in problem solution.