The Extractor software, developed by ForeKnowledge GmbH, works behind the scenes to automatically analyze emerging Insights from a news piece. It populates the following fields whenever it can:
Title | URL | Source | Published date | Implications | Tags | Key people | Author | Key organizations | Countries
In background it also captures Forecasts (statements about the future).
This is a revolutionary new capability and one which is not perfect. The Extractor is already working at over 97% accuracy and will improve further as we train the system to 'think' better. It may be unable to understand an item or misinterpret the news piece or report, which will require it to be manually analyzed as we used to do on all Insights. However, our tests show that the software is far more accurate, faster and consistent than humans in collecting most of the above information.
You may find the 'Implications' inaccurate at this stage as we teach the software to think better. However, we have found that if the Implication field is blank or the offered text is not an implication that this is more likely due to the fact that the Insight may not be about the future. In which case, you may choose to cancel its addition.
Some Tags may also need deletion and others added where you wish to bookmark your own future concepts or keywords e.g. a project name.
The saving in drudge time you get from not having to add most of the above fields can now be re-used by you to provide more critical and useful thinking time on the implications and expressed future concepts arising from the article. It offers a starter for one, which you can edit or change to your own observations. And, you can always return to the old method by adding your Insight manually - 'If you don't have a URL or prefer to add manually, click here.
The Extractor also reads PDFs but you will have to do a little more work in adding the 'Title' manually since there is no standard way of extracting these from published documents, today, However, it is capable of reading and analyzing long PDF reports in less than a minute and extracting statements about the future in the form of Forecastss. It does this automatically in background and displays its findings under the 'Refer' listing for each item in Insights. You cannot edit or delete Forecasts offered by the Extractor but you cann add your own from an Insight found by you. The tens of thousands of already collected future Forecasts are searchable, and come with a text reader to aggregate the statements into short Summaries. Paying members and Clients are then able to ask any question about the future and get full, instant Summaries as well as associated Tag Clouds and Timelines showing the direction of travel of the issue.
They can add more articles, PowerPoint and PDFs to add these instantly to the database and Summaries thus taking most of the drudgery out of literature reviews.
Bear with us: we are constantly improving the power of this software, particularly the Forecasting capability right now, which we see as the future of scanning.
Read more on 'Strategic Foresight as Knowledge Management' and 'Finding Future Words - How Shaping Tomorrow's new Extractor works'.
For further information, to suggest improvements or ask to use the capability for other applications please contact us.