It’s not so easy to do a public video demo of our new Pika 4.0 case management system design changes, because of confidentiality issues, but we will post select screenshots reasonably soon so you can get a visual idea of changes we have made to that application.

This TIG project was funded for an 18-month period from January 2008 through June 2009. Much of the report will ring familiar to those who have followed the project here, since much of what has already been posted mirrors what would be required in a TIG evaluation report. Essentially, this public project site enabled us to give others in the legal services community an ongoing, if lagging, report of progress on the project, while at the same time considerably easing the process of writing up the evaluation report at the end of the project since we had already written most it as we went along.

We’re winding things down here, but we will continue to post here at least through the next TIG conference in early 2010. Among other things, we will be detailing how in finalized form we are integrating our project’s GSA test frontend functionality into a more expansive shared organization portal, part of our current deployment of a heavily customized version of Pika 4.0. We have finished the LSNC redesign of Pika 4.0 as well as a new LSNC shared portal “front door” (built on WordPress), both of which are scheduled to be in place and in use by LSNC staff the day after the Labor Day break.

Stay tuned, people!

A few days ago my earlier post about metadata, with the conclusion that “we don’t need metadata,” caught the attention of Daniel Tunkelang. It just so happens that Daniel is the chief scientist at Endeca, a prominent enterprise information company. You know, like, he knows what he’s talking about.

Long story short, Daniel commented on my post here and then, after I responded, mirrored our discussion in Does Metadata Matter, a new thread at The Noisy Channel, his blog that hosts vigorous discussions of search design and other enterprise information issues way above my pay grade. Daniel and others there critically but constructively took me to task because of the empirically unsupported general conclusion that metadata is not needed, and the specific failure to make clear the anecdotal basis for our conclusion about metadata on this project. As you can see from the discussion at Daniel’s blog, they killed me on the empirical point. In response, I better explained there than I did in my original post why our conclusion about not needing metadata on this project makes sense.

The discussion there ended on Christopher’s grace note, something that the TIG program and others within the legal services community will appreciate:

I also want to applaud your project which I should have done before, the mission your team has set is very admirable. It’s gratifying to see technology being put to use to help people who may not otherwise be able to have access to the same advances we do.

If you’re interested in enterprise search, you should consider paying The Noisy Channel a visit.