How to improve search in FAST ESP

Friday, 25 June 2010 15:15

Semaphore is an ontology-driven semantic platform that is tightly integrated with the Microsoft FAST ESP indexing pipeline to allow rich, accurate subject metadata to be added to the FAST index.   This can be exposed in the Semaphore Application Framework - a best practice search interface that works with the FAST engine, or any bespoke or third party portal interface to deliver improved search filtering and discovery.

For any organization wanting to incorporate their taxonomy or ontology into their FAST based search system, Semaphore provide a comprehensive search extension.

• Complete management tool for building and maintaining taxonomies and custom dictionaries
• Automatic "About-ness" classification. While FAST will classify against a taxonomy, it's entity recognition mechanism used will typically find a "passing mention" to a taxonomy topic.  Semaphores rulebase classification mechanism uses significantly more complex rules to determine if the content is actually about the taxonomy topic. This approach ensures that facet filters or relevance weighting based off this index field return sensible results.
• The Semantic Enhancement Server provides links and relationships between topics that are modeled by subject matter experts and so allow for a findability and discover experience that cannot be delivered by clustering topics by their text content alone.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Smartlogic employs Microsoft Certified Professionals and we have a Microsoft Competency in ISVs/Software Solutions, demonstrating the investment we have made in supporting SharePoint and FAST ESP.