A compliance navigator powered by semantic search

Setting the Scene

In today’s fast-paced regulatory landscape, precision and speed are non-negotiable, especially for organisations navigating compliance. For BSI, the world’s first national standards body and a global authority in standards development, helping customers quickly locate the right information is core to delivering value.

Yet, even with over a century of expertise and a vast database of standards, their users faced a critical hurdle: a search experience that couldn’t understand intent - leading to missed results, frustrated customers, and lost revenue. 

This case study explores how BSI partnered with Datavid to turn that challenge into an opportunity. By embedding semantic search and knowledge graph technology into their Compliance Navigator platform, they didn’t just improve findability, they redefined it.

For product managers aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, boost retention, and increase monetization through smarter digital products, this is a blueprint worth examining. 

Want to improve your digital product’s findability? 
See how we help standards organisations transform search with semantics!

The Challenges

Building contextual search into Compliance Navigator. 

BSI has supported organisations globally in improving performance and reducing risk, but with the growing volume and complexity of standards, guiding companies toward sustainable growth has become increasingly difficult without smarter, more intuitive digital tools. 

The biggest challenge for BSI  has been to build a more powerful search system within their Compliance Navigator , which is a customer-facing web portal for organisations matching their requirements to applicable BSI Standards. 

With more than a century of experience century of experience of customers articulating their needs, it became essential for users to find the appropriate standard even without a precise search term. 

For example, before, a search for "cardiac catheter" returned no results because there was no exact match for this "text string" search. Empty results caused potential buyers to leave the website resulting in a low hitrate for online sales and a loss of revenue. 

BSI needed to implement semantic search to provide a better experience for its users, increasing revenue and retaining customers long-term.

The Solution

Semantic search enhanced by knowledge graphs. 

The solution proposed by Datavid is focused on extending and improving semantic search, i.e. the ability to understand context and intent rather than exact text string match. 

The goal was that even vague searches such as “cardiac catheter” would return the appropriate Standards for manufacturing implantable devices, leading to an increase in clients purchasing through the website channel and greater customer satisfaction with BSI’s service.  

 
Datavid worked on a solution based on the use of the knowledge graph, built on ontologies, capable of tracing the relationships between concepts and the BSl standards database. 

This solution included the UI/UX technology upgrade, which took the form of a simple three-tier architecture: frontend tier, proxy layer, services and data. 

The first tier aimed at using the technology stack to: 

• Overcome security breaches and other vulnerabilities 

• Improve the overall performance of the UX 

• Make data loads asynchronous 

The second tier aimed at: 

• Having a complete web-app framework 

• Managing the user session correctly 

• Enabling caching (to improve performance) 

• Enhancing security within proxy layer, to have an additional layer of data protection (access is not direct to the API on top of the database) 

• Having the possibility to add additional security at the infrastructure level for the data service layer 

The third tier is directed at the previous customer selection. 

This made it possible to build a semantic search system for the intent of the searcher and to bring out the right content. 

The Outcomes