Last October Abe was invited to deliver a presentation at Hunan University in China for the largest conference in Asia geared to librarians and information professionals. The conference was organized by iGroup, an Asia-based distributor of printed and online materials. iGroup, per their web-site has a “staff of more than 260, [and] continue[s] to focus on the information industry, catering to the needs of librarians, students, academics, educators, medical and health workers and research scientists.”

The theme of the conference was “The Role of the Library in the Virtual and Collaborative World” with an emphasis on how libraries can collaborate to better serve their patrons. Abe, and a number of high-profile individuals from the information industry, delivered presentations.

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A couple of months ago I gave a brief presentation at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose (actually, officially I was speaking at the KMWorld & Intranets show) making the claim that Federated Search is the technology that can unify disparate content within a company.

The talk was titled “Federated Search: True Enterprise Search.” Here is the abstract from that talk:

Enterprise Search Software as it is known today, whether from Autonomy, Endeca, FAST or others, cannot provide access to all the information of value at any reasonably sized organization with a single search. Organizational information-content exists in numerous silos accessible through a myriad of individual, incompatible indices-engines. Technical, cost and bureaucratic reasons prevent unifying all these various enterprise silos under one index.

State-of-the-art Federated Search software provides actual enterprise (-wide) single point of search-access to most, if not all, of the information repositories of value to an enterprise, including those beyond the firewall.

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