“Answer Adjacent” in “Three” Clicks: Applying Semantic Technologies to JPL’s Structured and Unstructured Flight Project Data

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, finding experience and expertise is critical to mission success but is often a challenge. Job titles, official institution roles, and even work assignment data isn’t easily analyzed and cannot tell a complete story about specific experience. Records produced during a flight project’s lifecycle can hold the answers, but searching and finding the right information usually requires knowing the right person who knows the right data system to query and how to query it. Finding the person with a specific expertise may take weeks. Learning who to start talking to may be a significant change for new employees. JPL’s Office of the CIO partnered with Enterprise Knowledge (EK) in a proof-of-concept initiative to apply semantic technologies to a subset of the Lab’s existing structured and unstructured flight project data. Eight weeks later, our presenters were able to demonstrate that an off-the-shelf graph search tool powered by a semantic tool suite could help employees find answers – or at least get “answer adjacent” – in about three clicks.