Access Innovations, Inc.
Unleashing the Full Potential of a Knowledge Base

According to recent IDC data, knowledge workers spend about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly about 30 percent of the workday, searching for information. It decreases the overall efficiency and productivity as, more often than not, they can’t find relevant information quickly due to the sheer volume of data. In today’s result-oriented culture and digitalized environment, knowledge management has become a critical ingredient for businesses seeking to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage. Along the same lines, organizations now realize the importance of a taxonomy in effectively managing their knowledge assets. As an industry leader in making information assets easily and automatically discoverable for businesses, Access Innovations is empowering companies with the best possible solution to their information management and semantic enrichment needs. “The semantic enrichment of an organization’s data opens the door to a multitude of opportunities and allows their users to access information more efficiently. This way, we help people save time and increase their efficiency so that they become more productive,” says Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President and Chairman at Access Innovations.

Founded in 1978, the company offers an extensive line of information management and database products and services, including its Data Harmony software tools and rich technical expertise to create robust information discovery systems. Whether it’s corporations, associations (non-profit and for-profit), publishers, or keepers of portal and knowledge management systems, Access Innovations can enable them to better classify and organize content in their knowledge base. With its fast, reliable, human-supervised AI platform, Access Innovations allows organizations to fully leverage their content. The company enables users to build and maintain all types of controlled vocabularies, create and capture metadata, as well as manage rule-based automated indexing.

Access Innovations primarily offers a combination of managed services, wherein it enhances and supports its AI solution, which can be installed or hosted in the cloud, with human intelligence. “Since all AI systems have to be trained, we provide a very functional, efficient, and accurate human interface to our system so that they can make corrections and train it quickly,” says Jay Ven Eman, CEO at Access Innovations. Unlike neural networks and vector analysis systems, Access Innovations’ Data Harmony platform is characterized by a very high level of accuracy in terms of labeling content. “We differentiate ourselves primarily in the way we interject our AI tools in the overall process of crafting semantic intelligence into the client’s content,” asserts Jay.

The company enriches its clients’ content using its AI-based system that comes with a graphical user interface, allowing non-programmers to use the interface and finesse it to a more accurate level. To put things in perspective, Marjorie explains how Access Innovations leverages a controlled vocabulary to categorize and label different words with the same meaning. She illustrates that an object can be termed differently, like a sofa, which can also be called a couch, settee, futon, or davenport, and more. “Using a controlled vocabulary, Access Innovations takes away the ambiguity by selecting one of the terms as the ‘preferred term’ and then builds a search algorithm to ensure that all the other terms point as synonyms to the preferred term,” explains Heather Kotula, VP, Marketing and Communications at Access Innovations. This increases relevance in retrieval, whereby structured semantics gain better results in both discovery and content search confirmation.

We differentiate ourselves primarily in the way we interject our AI tools in the overall process of crafting semantic intelligence into the client’s content

Access Innovations has established its prominence due to its quality services and support. “Ours is a quickly deployable system, which ensures a lower total cost of ownership.

It is our decades of experience and an exclusive focus on the satisfaction of end users that make us stand out,” Jay adds. Success stories of several clients across various industry verticals are a testament to the company’s capabilities and team expertise. Marjorie highlights one such story of an insurance company, which was paying over a million and a half dollars per year for storing big files in shared drives. They couldn’t delete any of those millions of archived documents, as they didn’t know which were subject to a litigation hold. With the application of taxonomy through Access Innovations solution, they were able to save huge amounts of money and lower the number to 178 items in total, which eventually helped them find information much more effectively.

In another instance, Access Innovations helped the Iowa Legislative Service Agency (LSA) when they were struggling to publish an update to the Bluebook as well as the online version of the code—a mandate after every legislative session. They also needed to integrate new laws and subsequent regulations created by the legislature into the existing code. Access Innovations helped them build a controlled vocabulary with which they tagged all their content. They used the Data Harmony tools to index all the content that is coming in, be it new proposed legislation, any new law passed, or an accompanying regulation. Moreover, they also used it to comb through their existing code base to find redundant information. Consequently, they identified 13 places in the code related to the burial of veterans, many of which were contradictory. With the help of Access Innovations, LSA was able to reduce the number of people who were charged with the job of sifting through information and ensuring they identify everything from 31 to 3.

Recently, the company assisted its clients in the health science publishing business with COVID-19 pandemic vocabularies and integrated those quickly into their existing taxonomies. This will help organizations in health care with the retrieval of relevant information and steer them ahead in their race toward finding a cure.

For the future, Access Innovations plans to expand its market reach and its Data Harmony platform’s capabilities. Moreover, the company is all geared up to bring forth a huge search package that would leverage the capability of taxonomies. “We have a strong hold on the scholarly and learned publisher market, and steering ahead, we aim to further expand our footprint in the corporate sector,” states Marjorie.