OpenPolicy: Knowledge Makes Document Searches Smarter
From the webpage:
The government has a wealth of policy knowledge derived from specialists in myriad fields. What it lacked, until now, was a flexible method for searching the content of thousands of policies using the knowledge of those experts. LMI has developed a tool—OpenPolicy™—to provide agencies with the ability to capture the knowledge of their experts and use it to intuitively search their massive storehouse of policy at hyper speeds.
Traditional search engines produce document-level results. There’s no simple way to search document contents and pinpoint appropriate paragraphs. OpenPolicy solves this problem. The search tool, running on a semantic-web database platform, LMI SME-developed ontologies, and web-based computing power, can currently host tens of thousands of pages of electronic documents. Using domain-specific vocabularies (ontologies), the tool also suggests possible search terms and phrases to help users refine their search and obtain better results.
For agencies wanting to use OpenPolicy, LMI initially builds a powerful computing environment to host the knowledgebase. It then loads all of an agency’s documents—policies, regulations, meeting notes, trouble tickets, essentially any text-based file—into the database. The system can scale to store billions of paragraphs.
No detail on the technology behind OpenPolicy but the mention of paragraphs is enough to make me wary of possible patents on paragraphs.
I am hopeful that even the USPTO would balk at patenting paragraphs in general or as the results of a search but I would not bet money on it.
If you know of any such patents, please post them in comments below.
I first saw this at: LMI Named a Winner in Destination Innovation Competition by Angela Guess.