Opendatasoft Launches New AI-Powered Semantic Search Engine

Improves data portal user experience and accelerates data discovery

Opendatasoft, the leading Data Portal provider, today launched its advanced AI-powered semantic search engine. Based on a vector model, it makes it easier and faster for data portal users to find relevant data assets, increasing usage and driving greater data democratization.

Organizations today understand the importance of data to their success. However, given the enormous variety and volume of data they generate and collect it can be difficult for users to find relevant data assets, even when centralized in a data portal. Traditional keyword-based search engines make discovering the right data asset difficult, often returning irrelevant or too many results. This limits the use of data, particularly by non-specialists, preventing the industrialization of data sharing and holding back value creation.

Opendatasoft’s focus is on delivering a data portal user experience that makes sharing, finding, and reusing data simple and seamless for all. Its new AI-powered search engine therefore goes beyond literal keyword search matches, providing results based on a deep understanding of the intent and contextual meaning of search terms. For example, a query on the word “gasoline” may return data asset results with terms such as “fuel”.

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The search engine also analyzes terms present in metadata, increasing the possibility of finding relevant results for each query. It further accelerates discovery by suggesting results in real-time, as users type, just as on consumer e-commerce websites. All of this delivers faster, more accurate results to users, increasing confidence that data assets are relevant and meet their needs.

Users benefit in multiple ways:
● Increased productivity, thanks to faster and more efficient searches that deliver more relevant results, reducing the number of queries required
● Simplified content discovery, regardless of the volume of data available on the portal or any technical terms used to describe it

Data portal administrators also benefit:
● Increased usage of data portals, thanks to better data discoverability and a more intuitive user experience
● Easier, faster management as data producers can describe datasets naturally within metadata, rather than spending time adding multiple synonym keywords to improve dataset visibility. As well as being time-consuming, the synonym approach risks overwhelming – and losing – portal visitors as it returns search results containing large amounts of redundant or irrelevant information.

“Artificial intelligence creates new ways to drive data democratization, such as through our new smarter, more intelligent search engine. AI-based search makes it simple and seamless to connect users with the data they are looking for, dramatically reducing search time, increasing productivity and delivering more relevant, useful results,” said Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO and co-founder of Opendatasoft. “Not only does this benefit users, driving data democratization, but it improves management for portal administrators and data owners, boosting overall efficiency. AI-powered search is Opendatasoft’s first major AI milestone, and we’re already working on more innovations that we expect to release during 2024.”

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