Users and Communities

This section describes IDOL features that allow your users to interact with the data in your system.

Agents

You can create agents in IDOL for a user to find and monitor information that is relevant to their interests.

You can create agents in a user-friendly way by using:

  • natural language descriptions.

  • example content .

  • keyword or Boolean expressions.

IDOL uses this content to train the agent. It analyzes the training text and documents and returns an encoded representation of the concepts. This representation includes the underlying patterns of terms, and probabilistic ratings for these terms.

You can retrain the agents at any time by submitting new content, and IDOL uses the new concepts to adapt the agent.

After you train the agent, you can use it to search for relevant content, from any repository that you can index into IDOL (such as Internet and intranet sites, news feeds, chat streams, and internal repositories).

Alerts and Email

IDOLcan analyze data when it receives new documents, and compare the concepts in documents with user agents. When new data matches a user agent, it can notify the user by email or a third-party system (for example by SMS or a pager).

Document Security

IDOL can secure documents in your index to make sure that only permitted users can view a particular document or see it in query results.

Many data repositories have security features that apply permissions to files, so that only authorized users can access them. IDOL document security maintains these permissions after you index the data into IDOL and ensures that query results return only documents that the user has permission to view.

Expertise and Collaboration

IDOL can use the agents and profiles that you create for your users to connect users who own matching agents or profiles. This process allows your users to instantly identify experts in a subject, eliminating time-consuming searches for specialists, and unnecessary researching of subjects where expert knowledge is already available.

You can use these expertise searches on demand, or automatically to match users with shared interests and expertise, to create virtual expert knowledge groups.

Profiles

IDOL can automatically create interest and expertise profiles for users, in real time.

IDOL creates interest profiles by tracking the content that a user views, and extracting the concepts from this content. IDOL uses this understanding of the concepts to keep user interest profiles up to date. You can use interest profiles to:

  • target information to users.

  • recommend content to users.

  • alert users to the existence of content.

  • put users in touch with other users who have similar interests.

IDOL creates expertise profiles by tracking the content that a user creates, and extracting the concepts from this content. IDOL uses this understanding of the concepts to keep user expertise profiles up to date. You can use expertise profiles to trace users who are experts in particular subject areas.