Ask HN: SOMs instead of curating content for a personal KB

This is a follow-up of a previous HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759 I forwarded the HN link to a friend of mine - his answer was, more or less: "The best product for building a personal KB was Autonomy at the end of the 90s... we linked it to various document sources (in his company) and it was awesome. A local VAR created a plug-in extension that allowed Autonomy to basically inspect MS Office documents on the fly (i.e. while you were writing them) showing related documents on the side, a bit like what gmail is doing now with the advertisement. The precision was fairly good... to the point that you could use a blank word document as a search engine... you wrote a sentence or two about what you were looking for, and Autonomy would start suggesting existing documents to match. You could also index your own (desktop) filesystem with the same product, and the results would stay local to your machine. Autonomy never cared to work on a personal edition, and we all know how things went after the HP buyout". My friend speculates that the "secret ingredient" was some sort of SOM (see below for links) - what he remembers is that Autonomy was very good at identifying clusters of rare words and/or statistical-significant-sentences, and used these to get a "distance" from other documents having similar/related content - we are not talking of something like Copernic (http://www.copernic.com/) but of a more "aggressive" search for relevance. This basically nipped in the bud any need for creating directory trees or tagging contents. http://davis.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/soms/ http://www.cis.hut.fi/research/som-research/som.shtml http://goo.gl/yH3zgb Now to my questions: - is there anything resembling the way Autonomy worked and that can be used on your own PC? - do you think that this would be a worthwhile idea for a product? (considering that Autonomy probably patented everything they could).