Creativity requires putting different ideas together (reassembling preexisting content). Increasing the lifespan of existing information and accumulated knowledge so it can be recycled and developed is inherent to the process of innovation.

Companies faced with managing their most precious information are finding it harder and harder to navigate their way around their software (ECM, KM, GED, BPM, CCM, DAM). Acronyms abound while functionality gets lost in the process. Magillem offers a solution that addresses the specific needs of its customer’s “business segment” and the “industry” in which it operates.

A Research (business segment) team in the Pharmacy field (industry) has very specific needs and challenges that determine the choice of a specific solution:

• Acquired knowledge is costly: therefore it must be recaptured as much as possible,
• Teams collaborate; researchers and laboratories are no longer isolated,
• Progress moves quickly; researchers can no longer afford to make a mistake (First time right),
• R&D’s added value resides in its development methods and how it manages complexity.

In other words, information must be stored, retrieved, manipulated, used and transformed based on these requirements.

Therefore the MRU (Minimal Reusable Unit) must be identified for future use, and it must be stored under a unique identifier, i.e., its VLNV (Vendor…Version).

From there, it gets complicated. Each item shares multiple hierarchical relationships, and changing one MRU affects all other uses of that element.

Relationships among content units are defined by business segment rules and taxonomies that vary from one industry to another.

Duplication of stored content units must be avoided. However, to develop this cell, its impact on past present and future projects must be measured.

The content, independent of its media, is henceforth a piece of data with meaning.

By using the business-segment schema, we can manipulate content based on its semantics and no longer its format.

Rigorously classifying, annotating and indexing content as it is created has immediate value.

Management of content throughout its entire life cycle is of crucial importance and value to engineers, who need to follow a sophisticated workflow based on collaborative efforts, right of use, authorized access to the system under development by each category of participant, and finally, interactivity with the ecosystem.

The technology

META-X manages several hardcopy document formats but also enables assemblies (publishing) independent from the base elements:

Why other technologies are useful but incomplete without a business-segment schema:

• Text mining is a technological “cartridge” for identifying text; to be effective; it must be filtered according to the schema.
• Thesauri align terms that define concepts but do not structure the assemblies. They feature relationships among concepts. To operate, the thesauri must be versioned and identified by the schema in the dataset.

Taxonomies describe the semantic rules (for words) or rules for inclusion, but not rules for the business segment assembly (for structures).