IDOL Platform

Web Portal for Academia and Citizens of Sweden

Cambridge (UK) / San Francisco, CA (USA), March 2008 - Autonomy Corporation plc, a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, has announced that the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet, has selected its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) platform as part of the Swedish government's initiative to promote research, eLearning, and collaboration within Sweden's education system.




Autonomy's Meaning-based Computing technologies will enable the Research Council to consolidate all of the country's academic information into a single web portal, Forskning.se.


As one of the co-owners and the host of the editorial offices for Forskning.se, the Swedish Research Council together with nine other public authorities wanted to develop a nationwide website to provide a single access point for academia as well as the general public to find online research information and learning support from disparate sources effectively. The aim of the portal is to make academic information more accessible by organizing data from various research projects, supplementing texts with comprehensible summaries and incorporating clear, straight-forward presentations.

The Swedish Research Council selected Autonomy's IDOL for Forskning.se for its ability to form an understanding of information conceptually, regardless of its format, and to automate many time-consuming manual processes. Through the use of Autonomy's automatic categorisation functions, Forskning.se's small editorial team is able to focus on its main business objective - the creation of new content for the site - rather than spending time managing the portal through manual classification and tagging of all existing and new data.

With IDOL, the portal's editorial team and various contributors will be able to upload all new articles quickly and accurately without the need to tag or create taxonomies: the software automatically classifies these documents. Users of Forskning.se will now be able to find information quicker, while delivering better return on investment for the Swedish Research Council.

Forskning.se contains information in various multimedia formats about everything from climate reports to the latest scientific progress in specialized medical fields. It offers separate entry points for teachers, scientists, high school students, and university students. The Autonomy solution will make it easier for these target groups to find relevant information because Autonomy's Automatic Query Guidance functionality gives the users suggestions for different filtering options to enable them to locate the data they require quickly.

"We often hear from teachers, students, scientists, and researchers that they would like to have a single website where they can find research and academic information easily and effectively. Autonomy will make this a reality, and through the technology's automation capabilities, we will be able to make this a viable and manageable project", said Ulf Daneklev, Forskning.se's editor at the Swedish Research Council.

Through Forskning.se, academic information will not only be more accessible to the public, but collaboration amongst universities, colleges as well as the research industry will be promoted, making a better quality of research and education in the country possible. The Swedish media will also have access the site to make use of various articles and interactive presentations and animations to support and explain popular news and feature topics.

"Autonomy takes pride in delivering innovative technologies to academia", commented Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. "We look forward to providing further support for the Swedish Research Council as it continues to enhance its web portal with more and more advanced features such as multi-media content."