“Enterprise information access technologies are entering a new phase of deployment and use,” said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner. “Technologies are maturing and now offer improved indexing, querying, presentation and drilldown of results. However, by itself the search function has limited value. The real value of information access technologies is in the upfront and ongoing efforts needed to establish effective taxonomies, to index and classify content of all kinds in order to provide meaningful results.”

Gartner uses the term “information access” to encompass a collection of technologies, including enterprise search; content classification; categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop or personal knowledge search to address user-controlled repositories to locate and invoke documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.