A reader from Singapore asked me two questions in relation to my recent update on Tacit Software.
Question 1. Can Tacit handle multi ethnic environments. Somewhere where Bestellung, Order and 命令 mean the same thing?
Tacit responded by saying that "ActiveNet fully supports the discovery and search of noun phrases from sources in English, French and German", and that "expansion into other languages is customer-driven". With respect to "customer-driven" expansion, Tacit noted in a subsequent email that there could be a "small development fee" for adding additional language support, but that it would depend on the specific agreement with the customer. Once the additional language support was built, it would be made available to all customers.
This approach sounds reasonable to me; Tacit already supports three main languages, and will embrace others when needed within the context of a specific customer engagement. I'm sure there are many things that Tacit could do, and this is a valid way of seeking market-driven clarity as to what they should do.
Instead of the inhouse development approach, another route that Tacit could adopt is the strategic partnership one, with a translation company like TRADOS, for example. That gives Tacit the freedom to retain a focus on collaboration auto-discovery, and to leverage someone else's focus on globalization via local language support.
Question 2. You mentioned the inter-agency expert discovery. How can the usual concern, that data is confidential, be addressed?
Data security for a cross-agency implementation, depending on the specific requirements, can be handled by introducing an additional approval step into the process. In other words, a moderator from each agency would be notified of inter-agency ActiveNet requests for both topics and people, and would be able to approve or deny each request. This means that people in Agency A could not see the topic and people information for Agency B, unless the moderator from Agency B approved it.
Again, from my perspective, this approach sounds reasonable and fair to both parties. Of course, there is nothing to stop two agencies from establishing a higher-level of automatic sharing of topics and people, but there are controls available to assuage data security fears.
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