Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot -- The Rock (1934)

For over 20 years, we have been working to make the knowledge lost in information available and usable. We pionereed a completely new approach to managing information and knowledge, dynamic taxonomies (also recently known as "faceted search").

Traditional search tools (relational database queries, text retrieval, subject indices á la Yahoo) are designed for retrieval, that is for situations in which the user knows exactly what he wants. These tools perform quite badly in most real situations:

Buying a digital camera
Finding a job
Selecting a photo
Finding a restaurant for tonight
Finding a suspect/missing person from his description
Finding the cause of a malfunction
...

These are all situations in which the user does not know exactly what he wants but needs to explore the infobase in a systematic and assisted way, focusing on some features and discarding others, until the number of alternatives is sufficiently small that they can be compared directly. Most "search" tasks are really exploratory in essence, and the widespread feeling that search does not work is caused by the use of the wrong tools for the job.

The Universal Knowledge Processor (UKP, US patent 6,763,349) is a knowledge management tool designed for easy and totally assisted browsing and retrieval of any type of data (text, images, video, etc) on the basis of a taxonomy, i.e. a hierarchical organization of concepts similar to Yahoo indices.

The user directly interacts with the conceptual tree index of the information base and can set a focus by selecting one or more topics of interest directly from the index. The system automatically discards irrelevant documents and prunes from the tree all the topics not related to the current focus. The conceptual index is now a conceptual summary of the user focus which shows all the topics related to the focus. The topics in the index can be used for further refinements up to a point in which the number of documents is sufficiently small for direct inpection. Analysis and actual use show that 3 iterations are sufficient to reduce a 10,000,000 items information base to about 10 items.

UKP computes related concepts on the basis of the actual classification: this simplifies the design of the conceptual index and performs a concept mining which fully accounts for unanticipated and dynamic concepts interrelationships. Multilingual access is supported, as well as the automatic classification of structured (database) data.

The Universal Knowledge Processor has an extremely wide application range. It includes e-commerce, e-auctions, topic-based portals, diagnostic systems for call-centers and medicine, missing/suspect persons identification, etc. UKP is especially important in mobile applications where a careful design of the conceptual index makes quick browsing and retrieval on large databases simple even with small display sizes.