Many organisations use acronyms in communication. Joining one can be a significant challenge, almost learning a new language. The bigger the organisation, the bigger the problem; collisions are more likely.
It is not uncommon for individual departments or organisational units to develop their own glossaries in spreadsheets or similar technologies.
Federated search could help connect those individual glossaries and allow them all to be searched at once. That's simple.
But the topology of the search network could be used to influence the search results. The hypothesis is that the results found near the person looking for the information (in terms of organisational topology) are the most relevant.