Box Graph unleashes relationships between content and users

Box has vast amounts of content in its stores, and as it begins to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to make it easier to surface, it also wants to expose each piece of content and how it relates to other content and users. To help achieve that, the company announced the Box Graph today at BoxWorks.

“The Box Graph enables customers to predictively recommend content that might be relevant to you. It would be impossible to do this without a graph,” Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Box, told TechCrunch.

The idea of a graph was first popularized by Facebook, which discussed an individual’s social graph, the connections they had between friends on the social network. In a similar fashion the Box Graph is building a network of connections, but instead of just friends, it’s between pieces of content and employees and how they relate to each other.

When the system begins to understand these connections, it can use the content in any number of interesting ways including surfacing content that might be interesting to you based on who you know and what other types of content you tend to use — or it could be used to move content through a workflow to the people that need to see it based on their jobs and what’s been happening with the piece of content before.

All of this is done within the confines of Box’s built-in permissions, security and compliance so you don’t get to see content that you’re not authorized to see, even if it the system believes you would be interested in it, based on similar content you tend to look at.

To demonstrate the power of the Graph, the company announced a new tool called “The Feed,” which Box describes as “a personalized activity feed that curates and surfaces the most relevant updates, insights and content for each Box user.” This could involve content that requires your immediate attention or content that the systems thinks is relevant to you based on previous interests. It could also share “trending” content that is popular among your peers.

The Box Graph and The Feed will be available starting early next year, according to Box.

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