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Verity Ultraseek Plays Vital Role in Success of State of Minnesota's Portal
Verity Inc., provider of enterprise software that enables organizations to maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment, announced its powerful, downloadable Verity(R) Ultraseek(R) enterprise search software has been integrated into the public information portal of the State of Minnesota.
The official Web site for the state is known as North Star (URL: http://www.state.mn.us). It is a comprehensive online presence for all government departments and 250 state agencies serving Minnesota government workers, residents and businesses as well as visitors and those seeking to conduct business with or in the state. On the leading edge of an emerging e-government trend, the Minnesota portal is the single information access point for all government services, offering up-to-date information with dynamic content management. In addition, the site's fundamental design and operating principles aim to foster cross-agency collaboration and information sharing while providing a quality online experience that meets different constituents' expectations on a 24x7 basis.
"North Star has made the Minnesota state government highly accessible, acting as the communications vehicle between the government and its five million residents," said Eileen Quam, the Minnesota Office of Technology's information architect. "The Verity Ultraseek enterprise search engine is a critical reason why North Star works as well as it does and it's the clear best choice from a financial perspective." The state chose the Verity Ultraseek search engine over other search options, including hardware-based ones.
Verity Ultraseek's superior search relevance capability enables site visitors to quickly locate information and interact with different parts of the state government from renewing automobile registrations to applying for licenses to practice veterinary medicine. The software's APIs enable easy integration with the site's existing content management software, allowing rapid, accurate creation and management of the data. According to Quam, "Verity Ultraseek's ease of integration had a positive impact on user's ability to navigate across the entire site."
In addition, the state is also leveraging Verity Ultraseek's Content Classification Engine (CCE) to effectively organize the half million dynamic documents on the site into browseable topics for easy searching. With the CCE Module, search and browse capabilities are tightly integrated. While viewing topics, users can conduct focused queries by searching within a topic. In response to queries, the CCE Module displays search results and topics related to the returned documents. The result: faster, more accurate searches. Taxonomies created or refined using Verity Ultraseek's CCE took into account that the same information would be of interest to different site visitors in different ways. Quam and her team devised a method of building primary and secondary taxonomies with that multiple usage in mind using Ultraseek. The approach also allowed for better and easier linkage with the multiple agencies' sites that sit behind the North Star portal.
"The State of Minnesota has harnessed the capabilities of Verity Ultraseek in a way that can serve as a model for the deployment of the Verity downloadable enterprise search software," said Anthony J. Bettencourt, Verity's president and chief executive officer. "We are pleased that the North Star portal's successful implementation has led other states and several major cities to adopt Verity Ultraseek."
A state with a population of five million, the North Star portal has a hit rate of approximately nine million per month. 26.05.2004, Verity Inc.
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