Case Study: Ontopical

Helping Ontopical customers get access to public government content easily with a relevant search experience

Search Relevancy Control Panel

Actionable Analytics

Access Control

ReactiveSearch UI components

Ontopical uses appbase.io to enable search over millions of public records

About Ontopical

We got the chance to sit down with the Ontopical team: Derrick Koenig, Founder and CEO, and David Fawcett, VP, Product Development. Ontopical is focused on extracting business intelligence and insights from public government content which is typically unstructured, published in the form of meeting agendas, minutes, and videos.

Their SaaS platform allows their customers in the private sector who interact with government organizations to easily identify business risks and opportunities, without having to read documents that are often hundreds of pages long… or watch hours of video. Derrick explains "We use machine learning to focus narrowly and rigorously on expediting valuable data out of messy unstructured content, to get real-time intelligence into the hands of our enterprise clients at the speed demanded by business."

Main Challenge

"We came from a platform where we were leveraging Sphinx. It worked well for the early days and as a basic integration but as the scope of the project expanded, we found it quite unyielding and hard to configure and scale. It also didn't have any easy tie-ins to help us understand what was going on," explains David. With a checklist of features, the Ontopical team got on the lookout for a fast and comprehensive search while giving them full control over their own data. One of the key points for the team was analytics. "Initially, we weren’t focused on analytics but later on, we realized how important it would be. We also realized that it would be a lot of work to configure the type of analytics we needed with Sphinx. Since we were about to pivot into a new offering soon, we decided that it wasn't a natural fit for our product and the demographic that we were targeting", David continues.

The Solution

What caught Ontopical's attention to ReactiveSearch.io is the tight integration it has with Elasticsearch. A major positive was also the search and click analytics that worked out-of-the-box. David comments, "Analytics has been a huge win for us. ReactiveSearch.io easily ties into our current tech stack with ReactiveSearch components and it has been fantastic. This really helped us get off the ground fast. We turned it around in a month, and we're up and running with pilots in a couple of weeks. We're also now looking into adding new features. And whenever we have needed support, the team has been fantastic and really responsive on chat."

"Analytics has been a huge win for us. ReactiveSearch.io easily ties into our current tech stack with ReactiveSearch components and it has been fantastic. This really helped us get off the ground fast."

David Fawcett

VP, Product Development

Moving Forward and Results

"Moving forward, our focus is going to be developing an even tighter analytics integration so that we can track custom events and check how our customers are interacting even more with the search. We will also be looking to improve continue improving search relevancy, which to us seems like a magic black box sometimes. We are evaluating some options with machine learning that we can tweak to our use-case, leveraging analytics to continually improve search relevance." concludes David. ReactiveSearch.io features that Ontopical leverages today:

Search Relevancy Control Panel - Learn more

Actionable Analytics - Learn more

ReactiveSearch UI components - Learn more

Access Control - Learn more

"Moving forward, our focus is going to be developing an even tighter analytics integration so that we can track custom events and check how our customers are interacting even more with the search."

David Fawcett

VP, Product Development

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