Search engines do not keep up with the rapid explosion of Web pages. Even one of the best engines, Northern Light, only searches one-sixth of the Web's pages. The lack of organization on the Web means that the average Web user can issue a multitude of searches without retrieving a meaningful result. In addition, the distractions of the open Web make profitable business use of the Web even more difficult. Information providers need a common way to further qualify their information to enable the next generation of search engines to deliver much better results.
Corporations suffer knowledge management problems as well.
Here the issue involves the corporate practice of establishing of large data warehouses to store all corporation online. Here information access problems are compounded because corporate data is usually in a broad number of formats. Some of our most critical data is stored in legacy systems in proprietary data formats. Even if we can access the information we want, synthesizing the data into a meaningful knowledge base is nearly impossible. Finally there is a growing need for knowledge management on a personal level.