New Approaches Towards the Delivery of Service Information Using Semantic Correlation Rules

Knowledge about products and their applications, as well as how to use them, is often distributed in different places within companies. In the past, this has been an internally and externally accepted situation leading to time-consuming searches for required data. Nowadays, expectations of in-time delivery of information and the general view of knowledge processes as well as on associated data are changing radically. Traditional methods and approaches for storing, distributing and accessing information are therefore in many cases inappropriate and are questioned on industry-side. For example, in the domain of customer service of B2B products in machinery industry, it was common to communicate by phone with experts and help-desk-organizations, who provided the required information by experience or by informal information exchange networks. Under the pressure of digitalization and the constant increase in efficiency, as well as the demand of customers to obtain requested information more quickly, new ways of providing and connecting information are becoming increasingly relevant. It is still unrealistic to assume that all relevant information can be prepared specific to each target group and to each application within a short period of time. Rather, the challenge is to create and store information in the future in a structured way with meaningful semantic and consistent metadata and, on the other hand, to relate this new information to existing information in such a way that the user can be helped quickly and easily. Several preconditions are crucial to build up a new information infrastructure: First, management has to be convinced of the benefits of storage and intelligent search environments and to get support from relevant stakeholders. Subsequently, new information architectures require smart approaches for content authoring and metadata enrichment supporting information delivery via different media channels for relevant customer groups. Time and effort for setting up this new architectures has to be argued and justified.