Getting Started

Cambashi has built a large digital library to supplement the physical paper library we have assembled on IT in industry. Cambashi e-Xpert™, an intelligent agent, is the tool we use to extract the nuggets we need from this online resource.

The Internet has many relevant pages with a wealth of information, but there are also many pages that are totally irrelevant. If you ask a normal search engine for pages about IT in Industry, it will typically return over 4 million pages. The pages you want to read are probably there, but if the first 30 or 40 results are not quite right, you will probably give up.

The Cambashi e-Xpert™ is designed to cut through to the pages you really want to read by using a "knowledge base" which discriminates in favour of a particular topic. It is our vertical portal, quickly leading us to the information we want. Its aim is to return highly relevant pages without the hundreds or thousands of irrelevant ones. It achieves this by pre-selecting and classifying pages using domain rules to identify their relevance. In doing so, it compiles a database of relevant pages categorised by IT Application, IT Vendor, Industry Sector and IT Infrastructure.

In the first instance the Cambashi e-Xpert™ intelligent agent can be used as a desk research tool. You can apply a series of filters to the database and it will return the pages that score highly against the chosen filters. These filters use domain rules not keywords. For example the filter "knows" that the page is about the Automotive Industry if the page talks about Bosch and starter motors. You can apply more filters, or type in an additional search phrase to narrow down the result set still further.

This is a brief explanation of the product, but how did we get there? We won our first DTI Smart Award in December 1997, which enabled us to proceed with a feasibility study. We started with a prototype "knowledge base" which is fundamental to the pre-sorting and classification of web pages for our database. In December 1998 we won our second DTI Smart Award which helped us to develop the product. Since then the database has been greatly expanded as Cambashi consultants have continued to incorporate their knowledge and expertise into the tool. This has culminated in the imminent release of the Beta version of Cambashi e-Xpert™. To date, we have invested 200k Euros in the development and used the Cambashi e-Xpert™ on a score of internal projects.

Please follow the links below to view the Cambashi e-Xpert™ example search results from the Alpha version.

Cambashi e-Xpert™ Search Results (1)

Cambashi e-Xpert™ Search Results (2)