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When a person is presented with an important question in which the answer holds a lot of value to them, they seek out someone with wisdom to provide to them a reliable answer. It is the knowledge/information they contain, tempered by their wisdom, which gives their reply weight and the recipient a high level of confidence in their answer.

 

It is no accident that ‘Sophia’ is the Greek word for wisdom, as that is what it provides to a user conducting a search: Wisdom on top of information. 

 

In tech speak, Sophia is a Contextual Discovery Engine (CDE) designed to automatically identify key themes from unstructured content in order to make it easier to understand and make meaning from the content. (I like to say it takes data/information and turns it into knowledge.) Based upon semiotics, Sophia understands the different meanings words can have in different contexts. Query terms are then presented in their different contexts; this concept is an important one. Java, for example, in and of itself is simply a word. Traditional search engines will look for the word “Java” and return all the documents it finds with the word “java” in it; this can be quite a long list. Sophia is smarter than that; it has the wisdom to do more. Instead of retrieving a flat list for you, Sophia will group the search results into what it calls Themes. These themes are collections of ‘like documents’ each related to a different context for the query “Java.” Sophia will present to you themes such as: java programming language, coffee, Java (An Indonesian Island), prehistoric man (Java man) etc. 

 

It takes the documents and organizes them in the same way you and I would. This saves users a lot of time sifting through long lists of information and assimilating it into the equivalent of themes themselves. You simply select your theme and off you go. And they do it without the expensive crutches traditional search engines need (taxonomies, metadata, cataloguing, etc.) in order to come close to the same level of competence. It simply works right out of the box.

 

If you are already dealing with a well named, defined and robust system - you can map your existing data into a variety of well-defined business tools using traditional concepts like taxonomies. However, if your data is the end result of uncontrolled growth, years of mismanagement, or the unrepentant stepchild of botched best intentions, Sophia can be a great first step in the right direction for taking control back from your data.