One sentence summary
Company information
Oracle Technology Network (OTN) is the world’s largest
community of developers, database administrators, and technical architects. The
more than 5 million registrants have diverse backgrounds ranging from Windows
to Linux administration to architecture of SOA applications.
Case description
OTN Data Silos Limited the Discovery of Content That Mattered Most
OTN editors felt their content was difficult to find and
much of it was being missed. Classic OTN content is a collection of horizontal
portal websites plus blogs, podcasts, forums, and software downloads. This
content is served up in separate silos unified only by the homepage links and
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) results. That segregation, aggravated by
the tendency of task-focused OTN users to wear the blinders of their technical
specialty, meant more useful information related to their interest area
remained undiscovered –even by OTN users who visited the site daily.
Enterprise 2.0 solution
Leveraging Seamark’s Relational Navigation, Content Analytics and Web 2.0 Widgets
After a rigorous internal and external search for the right
solution, Siderean Software’s Seamark Navigator platform was selected to revamp
the OTN site. As a result, instead of a lengthy and complex integration process
to aggregate all OTN content and build a new site, Oracle tapped built-in
Siderean Seamark capabilities including content analytics, data visualizations
and RSS feeds. “We also got to use some of Siderean’s new AJAX widgets like the
date slider,” said Oracle’s OTN Editor, Justin Kestelyn, “which ups ONT’s cool
quotient and eases discovery.
Seamark’s Semantic Web- and AJAX-based solution for OTN dynamically
outlines and presents to users the full scope of relevant information they
need. When an OTN visitor subsets his/her content search by querying a topic or
entering it into Oracle’s SES text search, Seamark enumerates the content items
that are presented in each category. The AJAX
widgets then provide non-textual data visualizations and dynamically refine the
results. For example, a user selecting Oracle RAC as the query could then
choose the most prolific RAC blogger from the tag cloud widget, select a date
range near the date of the last RAC release, and then link to a specific forum
discussion of interest on RAC in open source environments.
“We’ve also given users the ability to create a relational
navigation view specific to their interests across these various Oracle
systems, then subscribe to it as an RSS feed mash up,” said Kestelyn. “Take
that, Yahoo Pipes.”
Results / Benefits
Flexibility to Manage Unstructured Data Resources
Oracle was impressed with Seamark’s ability to aggregate
multiple conventional and unconventional data resources including: Oracle
Databases 10g, Oracle SES, external blogs, user forums, RSS feeds, and other
unstructured text. Also, the relational navigation features provided by
Siderean meant OTN editors did not have to be clairvoyant about the needs of their
users. On the contrary, the less flexible approach of guided navigation
requires freezing a predetermined hierarchy before deployment and empowers
drilldown only, failing to lead users to cross-linked material.
“Seamark meant we didn’t need to try to be prescient and
rebuild navigation that anticipated the needs of an incredibly diverse set of
users,” said Kestlyn.
Taxonomy Creation and Management
Oracle worked in conjunction with Siderean to develop and
manage the needed taxonomy. Leveraging entity extraction and content
classification, the new semantic and navigable OTN site was deployed quickly
with a working taxonomy. Editors tuned it on the fly to add, change, or remove
terms and properties to better illuminate and optimize content interrelationships.
This flexible web of data is now presented to users with relational navigation,
helping them master discovery.
The OTN Semantic Web is available at:
http://otnsemanticweb.oracle.com
Screenshots
