PoolParty brings Semantic Power to Confluence

PRLog (Press Release) - May 16, 2012 - Semantic Web Company will release a semantic plugin for Confluence at this year´s Atlassian Summit and Semantic Tech & Business Conference, both to be held between May and June in San Francisco. PoolParty PowerTagging will support semantic tagging and indexing within Atlassian's Confluence.

Andreas Blumauer (CEO, Semantic Web Company) describes the idea behind PoolParty PowerTagging (PPP): "Tagging is still not a very popular task, especially in corporate environments. Many users don´t see the benefit of creating metadata to describe the actual content. A typical counter-argument to social tagging is that there are too many words for the same thing. Even if users are tagging very hard others won´t find necessarily such content, because they will use different words to search. As one tags with ‘New York City’ the other does with ‘NYC’ and the third uses ‘Big Apple’ etc. So tagging facilities of enterprise software platforms like Confluence are rarely used and don´t help to index content at all. Search is mostly based on classical full-text indexing. Semantic search as seen more and more on the WWW has still not entered the enterprise realm."

PoolParty's PowerTagging brings thesaurus based indexing to Confluence

PoolParty PowerTagging (bit.ly/pool-pp-1) is able to analyse each Confluence page and to insert concepts from a thesaurus and all of their names automatically. Users can curate all suggested tags or they can index their spaces automically resulting in a semantic index. This makes search more comfortable than ever before. PoolParty PowerTagging (bit.ly/pool-pp-1)uses controlled vocabularies (thesauri) based on W3C´s SKOS Standard. Semantic PowerTagging means that concepts are attached to pages and documents rather than putting labels on them. Various tags like ‘New York City’, ‘NYC’ and ‘Big Apple’ actually refer to the same concept, thus it is sufficient if one of the various terms is used for labeling, connecting all other labels automatically.
There are two main application scenarios which can be realised on top of Confluence and its PowerTagging extension:

Semantic Search: Fully integrated with Confluence´s built-in Lucene based search facility, users no longer have to type in search phrases literally: This feature is especially interesting for domains in which a lot of technical terms or abbreviations are commonly used or for enterprises in multi-lingual environments.
Content recommendation: Identifying similar and semantically matching contents especially in larger Confluence instances is a crucial task: Imagine you´re working for a recruiting company and you would like to match a new open position with all people in your applicant database. Or: Imagine you´re working on technical documentation and you can provide your customers automatically with further readings. Or: Imagine you´re working on a slidedeck and you´ll see instantly if some of your colleagues have worked on similar issues recently.

"Don´t re-invent the wheel again and again. Save time and money. PoolParty PowerTagging will help to fulfill these tasks when creating rich contents more efficiently than ever before. You can link similar contents within Confluence automatically and you can fetch further readings even from the WWW like from Wikipedia. "

At this year´s Atlassian Summit (summit.atlassian.com/) and Semantic Tech & Business Conference (semtechbizsf2012.semanticweb.com), both to be held between May and June in San Francisco, Semantic Web Company will present this brandnew plugin for Confluence (www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/overview), the leading Content and Social Collaboration software.
If you are interested in trying out PowerTagging, please drop us a note (bit.ly/KOBNVI)!