It is well known that the amount of data in the world doubles very rapidly. Estimates of the rate vary: once every three months, once a year, every two years, or every three years. There is even a law predicting the growth, which is known as "Reed's Law". One reason for the differing estimates is that they predict growth for different types of data (business data, social networks, etc.). Whichever rate of growth we choose, it is clear that the amount of data in the world is increasing at a phenomenal rate. According to a study, by the University of California, Berkley, there were five exabytes of new data created worldwide in 2002 alone. That is about 5,000,000,000 GB of information.

As the amount of data increases, the problem is not so much that we do not have the information in our organization, it is more that it is difficult to find answers amongst all the other information that we have.

A key requirement of any collaboration system is that it allows users to...