Improving enterprise search

Huge problems for search in the enterprise Pandia, Dec 18, 2011

Enterprise search is not web search. It involves searching across disparate database. This article has some data on how bad search is - "some employees spend up to two hours per day searching for information in intranets and enterprise search tools"

The findings and discussion come from a report from The Digital Workplace by Stephan Schillerwein available from Infocentric Research.

"According to Schillerwein, one of the main reasons for the problems of enterprise search is the lack of context. In days of old, information in the enterprise was found by secretaries — real persons, not computerized assistants — who knew who you were, what your job was and what you were currently working. A search engine has none of this context. "

Schillerwein takes a very personal approach - what the employees does, needs, and prefers. There is no mention of an enterprise taxonomy

Landscape of Enterprise Search - book

A short introduction to enterprise search, Pandia (Dec 10)

Short presentation with highlights from Stephen Arnold's book, The Landscape of Enterprise Search. You can buy the book for a mere 20 USD.

More about finding the right solution at Pandia Enterprise Search.

Introduction to taxonomies and thesauri

LLRX has picked up Gail Rayburn's presentation on Taxonomies and Thesauri to the Washington DC SLA chapter. (Nov 1, 2011). It's a very good primer to the terms and structure, and a guide to how to go about building one. Includes a brief introduction to ontologies as well.

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2011 Presentations

Presentations from Taxonomy Boot Camp, Oct 31 to Nov 1,2011, are available at http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2011/presentations.aspxhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

New Directions by Don Turnbull takes us on a tour of organizing data and information emotively (by mood), for the individual - the personal taxonomy, behavioral patterns, judgement - ratings and permissions, and lastly, the one we know a bit more about, semantics and clustering.

Very interesting example of working with taxonomies in the presentation on Rebuilding Taxonomy Warehouse as an Ontology from Dave Clarke at Synaptica International.

Gary Carlson has good advice and amusing examples in Avoiding the Autobiographical Taxonomy

Other well known presenters include Heather Hedden, Patrick Lambe, Seth Earley, Tom Reamy.

Taxonomy Management Tools

New Advisory Paper: Taxonomy Management Tools, Angela Guess, Semantic Web (Nov 17)

Costs money but could be useful -- "New Taxonomy Management Advisory Paper from The Real Story Group(PRWEB) November 15, 2011

The Real Story Group just released a new Advisory Paper: "Taxonomy Management Tools: A Comparative Evaluation." Taxonomy management tools have become a key player in end-to-end architectures for tackling content organization challenges, but the tools vary substantially in approach, and the marketplace as a whole remains somewhat immature, according to The Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates web and enterprise technologies."

Taxonomy and Metadata Uppermost

Taxonomy and Metadata and Findability Influence Traditional Roles, Theresa Putkey, KeyPoint Usability Consulting (Oct 17)

A view from the trenches perhaps --

"As an information architect, I work with companies who are struggling with information organization. They recognize the need to put their information into a content management system (CMS) to ensure digital information or digital surrogates for physical objects can be found. As a consultant, companies hire me to help build metadata and taxonomy structures."

US National Agricultural Library Agricultural Thesaurus

http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, Press release from USDA (Oct 11, 2011)

The Agricultural Thesaurus from the National Agricultural Library (US) is fully available online.

" It provides standard terms in both English and Spanish that can be used for indexing to improve the retrieval of information."http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Advances in text analysis

Meaning-Based Computing: Text Analysis Takes a Great Leap Forward by Terence K. Huwe, Information Today (Sept / OCt 2011)

Meaning-based computing (MBC) is finally getting its due.

"MBC unites the power of modern search protocols with recent advances in text pattern recognition, language-context analysis, and even “sentiment analysis”— which sounds somewhat mysterious. The cumulative advances in MBC are enabling computers to make far more useful inferences about the meaning of communications, even as language usage evolves. Although MBC has been used over the past 8 years with considerable success, the synergy of recent advances has gained wider attention. "

MBC will aid, not supplant, the creation and use of taxonomies for access.

"Taxonomy: It will still matter. The contemporary web is a matrix of artifacts and living documents that have their own “social life,” as Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s John Seely Brown famously said in the book, The Social Life of Information, which he co-authored with Paul Duguid. HTML5 and the semantic web will add embedded functionalities that further support the development of taxonomies, ontologies, and crowdsourcing techniques to tag useful resources. Meaning-based computing will not supplant these features, although it will likely introduce powerful new ways to look inside document wrappers and parse the evolving meaning of everyday language. If so, then MBC presents digital content managers with another new opportunity to improve access and retrieval. "

Browsable facets

Categories, Facets—and Browsable Facets? by Jaimie Sirovich, UX Matters (Aug 23)

For people designing taxonomies for e-commerce sites, this article could be the ticket. It's about creating a browsable facet - a situation where facets (attributes) can intersect with a taxonomy of categories. Product search can have this problem - where the structure is based on brand (Sony, Panasonic etc) and it is difficult to filter by facet.

The Synaptica Taxonomy Warehouse

Synaptica has re-vamped its informational website at www.taxonomywarehouse.com. "Taxonomy Warehouse is a free online resource that has answered millions of enquiries about taxonomies".

From the e-newsletter:

"This year we imported all of the content from the old Taxonomy Warehouse website into a Synaptica system and re-engineered the directory to become a semantically rich ontology. When you visit Taxonomy Warehouse, all the content and functionality you will see is dynamically generated from Synaptica. Besides providing the taxonomy community with lots of valuable content, we hope that the all-new Taxonomy Warehouse will provide a showcase for building and publishing ontologies. We invite you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep informed as we roll out additional content and features."

The Taxonomy Watch Blog is pleased and honoured to be listed in this database.

Online Course - Ontologies

Semisphere and Semantic Web offer a 4 week online course on Intro to Semantic Technologies, Linked Data, and Ontologies - starts October 17, 2011

Contents:

1. Semantic technologies
2. Linked data
3. Ontologies

Enterprise Search - vendors and trends

Stephen E Arnold often writes about search companies and is an expert on the industry. Pandia has summarized a few main points from his most recent e-book, Landscape of Enterprise Search.

Enterprise Search, Trends and Solutions

Note the new intelligence that is embedded in the new search products:
http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
"Search vendors and niche software specialists offer components than can assign index terms not contained in a source document.

The advantage of systems that assign metatags via “smart software” or via a combination of automatic systems and human subject matter experts is sometimes called “discovery”. The idea is that the interface displays related information or suggests documents that may help the user answer a question. "

Leading companies in this field are Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo, Exalead, Google and Microsoft.

The book is available for download for only $20 - sounds like a bargain to me -- http://www.pandia.com/enterprise-search/

Ontologies needed for healthcare

Why Do We Need Ontologies in Healthcare Applicatihttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gifons by Joel Amoussou,Adventures in Computing. (Aug 27)

Some effort here to define ontologies vs data structures.

"Ontologies are our conceptualization (understanding) of the world while information models (of data structures) describe and constrain how the data is stored and transmitted in messages."

He presents a strong argument on why ontologies - a semantic frame of reference - is so direly needed in healthcare.

"For obvious reasons, healthcare applications require a high degree of model quality and consistency. This is not always possible or easy to do with traditional approaches such as object-oriented design (the HL7 RIM is based on the UML) and data structures such as XML and relational database schemas.

A clear and clean separation of concerns is needed between the semantic model (the ontology) and the information model (the model of how the data is structured in an XML message or the health application's data store). The ontology can be used to verify that the content of a message is accurate in regard to our conceptualization of the world, while the information model is used to validate the data structure in the data stores and XML messages exchanged with other applications. "

Content Choreography Seminar Series

Fascinating new 4-part webinar series coming up at Earley and Associates - Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography Is Critical to Information Management

"Dynamic content management combines sophisticated use of taxonomy and content metadata to choreograph and assemble information based on various factors – who the user is, what step in a process they are engaged in, what information they need to execute a task, the topics they are interested in, etc."

The Earley newsletter described content choreography very cleverly -- "Taxonomy and metadata have the potential to be so much more than just strings on a content puppet (although they certainly act that way at a minimum). That's where the choreography part comes in - planning, composing, organizing, presenting, reacting to audience interaction in a controlled yet artful way. It's like the difference between your last high school dance and the Cirque du Soleil."

There is an accompanying slideshow presentation with definitions, process for building, and application.

Starts September 15, 2011

HP acquires Autonomy

HP to Acquire Info Management Software Firm Autonomy, Joab Jackson, IDG news via PCWorld (Aug 18)

Hewlett-Packard is changing its strips from hardware to software - it is acquiring information management software vendor Autonomyfor $10.3 billion. It wants into enterprise software - and Autonomy has that in spades.

"Founded in 1996, Autonomy offers a broad line of information management software, including enterprise search, content management, data analysis and governance software. It serves more than 25,000 organizations, including BAE Systems, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, FedEx, Ford, the New York Stock Exchange, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Software companies such as Citrix, Oracle, Sybase, Symantec, Tibco as well as HP itself all incorporate Autonomy software into their own packaged offerings."

Eqentia using semantic technologies

Eqentia Offers More Robust Taxonomy Capabilities For Content Curators, And More, Jennifer Zaino, Semantic Web (Aug 3)
the
A lot is happening in use of taxonomies at Eqentia, a custom-news centre, to help users find more on topics of interest.

"Eqentia added to its content discovery and knowledge management portal this week features to recommend additional content or people connections to end users and content curators. But it’s also been doing some other interesting work in the past couple of months on the back-end that draws on semantic technologies to help curators and content administrators of custom Eqentia-based knowledge portals with their taxonomies."

Google+ entities and attributes

Thoughts on Google Plus: The Magic Isn’t Social, It’s Semantic by Christine Connors, Semanticweb.com (July 29, 2011)

Christine Connors said, that Google+ is “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.”

This is why - "Why did I do so? Well, G+ follows some of the basic principles of linked data: it uses persistent HTTP URIs for people, Sparks (concepts) and posts. It allows you to indicate a relationship between to entities and give that relationship a type. It collects, and types, attributes about entities from the expected experts – the entities themselves."

The article is a real-life short course in entities and attributes.

Interview with Margie Hlava

Stephen Arnold got an Exclusive Interview with Margie Hlava, Access Innovations (July 19)

They seem to be friends - "On a rare visit to Louisville, Kentucky, on July 15, 2011, I was able to talk with Ms. Hlava about the explosion of interest in high quality content tagging, the New Age word for indexing. Our conversation covered the roots of indexing to the future of systems which will be available from Access Innovations in the next few months. ... How often do I in rural Kentucky get to interact with one of the, if not the, leading figure in taxonomy development and smart, automated indexing? Answer: Not often enough."

Go on to read the full interview for more on indexing and taxonomies

ConceptSearching - taxonomy webinar for Sharepoint 2010

Concept Searching, a partner of Microsoft, offers a webinar on setting up a taxonomy with Sharepoint 2010 - August 10, 2011

Webinar: Leveraging Taxonomy Term Store for SharePoint - defining a multi-taxonomy structure for content management - "Get your arms around your business content. Best practices to designing a taxonomy and metadata schema to work with the Term Store for SharePoint 2010! "

Details at Microsoft Events - Click to Attend

Also check recorded webinars for previous topics.

How to build faceted navigation

Building Faceted Navigation That Doesn't Suck by Mike CP, SEOMoz (June 19)

How to build a faceted navigation system for a web site - recommends using Ajax - "AJAX can make the user experience of applying and unapplying filters to your navigation fast and enjoyable. "

Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus

Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus in SKOS/RDF format

Library and Archives Canada Canada is making its Subject Thesaurus available for download.

"The Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus is a bilingual thesaurus consisting of terminology that represents all the fields covered in the information resources of the Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada is exploring the potential for linked data and the semantic web with LAC vocabularies, metadata and open content."

From the about page: "The tool is primarily intended for content managers, librarians, indexers and metadata developers in federal departments and agencies who must select controlled subject terms to index Government of Canada Web resources."

Taxonomies as part of "content choreography"

Earley and Associates has webinars to help in thinking about design of information management systems to control information overload.

The email announcing these gave an overview of tools.

"This so-called "information overload" problem will be solved in the same way - by creating lists, classification structures, bibliographies, reference materials and all sorts of dynamic, curated content. The best web sites have the capability of anticipating what users need and assembling that content dynamically - something we refer to as "content choreography" - the ability to coordinate, weave and present content into new information products and services based on the needs of a diverse set of users all operating on the site at the same time. And of course, to combine, curate, and choreograph content effectively requires metadata, taxonomies, consistent organizing principles tuned to audience, task and problem."

It beings with Taxonomy and Master Data Management (June 23)

Faceted Approach for Information Management

Designing the Samurai sword: using facets to support agile, highly-effective information management By Jennifer Smith, FUMSI (June 1, 2011)

Jennifer Smith writes persuasively on the ease of using a faceted design for retrieving information. She works for ONEIS, a UK company that desogms and supports information management systems.

She makes the faceted approach sound easy - "When deploying a faceted system, you need to map out what information you have, who needs to access it and how they would want to find it. You then create the structure for representing that information using Types and Attributes."

Toolbox for IT has the answers

Toolbox for IT is a rich resource of information about all things related to information management - the complete gamut of knowledge management, records management, cloud, enterprise applications, enterprise architecture and much more. Taxonomy and ontology are covered too under knowledge management. This is a community-based site with blogs and wikis where participants contribute content and discuss issue. Good resource for getting definitions and descriptions, and for asking questions and participating.

Managing information through classification

Get Your Data Under Control with Automated Content Categorization (PDF), AIIM, (May 2011)

White paper from Recommind. Classification is still the method for managing data but manual can't handle the high volumes and automated has errors. Recommind claims to have a solution.

"Today CIOs have choices beyond the manual and automated approaches, such as Recommind Decisiv™ Categorization. As part of Recommind’s suite of data management tools, Decisiv Categorization offers automated classification through supervised learning.
The technology effectively leverages the knowledge of human beings to teach technology to better automate classification." -

Webinar on Msater Data Management

Taxonomy & Master Data Management - free webinar from Earley and Associations - June 23, 2011

"The approaches discussed are key to harmonizing disparate sources of data with a master data management architecture. We also provide insights into tool capabilities needed to support complex data mapping by overviewing capabilities of Oracle's PDQ (Product Data Quality) suite."

Tool to build faceted navigation

VisualDataWeb Announces the Release of tFacet, SemanticWeb.com (May 15)

People developing a faceted view of data may find tFacet from VisualDataWeb helpful.

"... a new tool that applies known interaction concepts to allow hierarchical-faceted exploration of RDF data.” According to the description, “The aim is to facilitate ordinary users to formulate semantically unambiguous queries so as to support the fast and precise access to information. Used interaction concepts are e.g. a directory tree and interchangeable columns that are already well-known from other applications. The directory tree, for example, is used to enable the intuitive exploration and selection of hierarchical facets. "

Website has a short screencast and a demo.

eTaxonomy and Social Media in Marketing

Sentiment Analysis and Taxonomy, Seth Earley

Sentiment analysis means monitoring social media for tone of comments - a new "content ecosystem", as Seth Earley notes on his slide presentation. He shows the use and need of an etaxonomy to map the relationships about terms, and provide context. There are many segments to manage: competitors, audience, target markets, channels ...

Second part of slide show is about the impact of social media on marketing, with useful review of challenges of marketing classification, and the application of eTaxonomy facets to marketing practice.

Upcoming Webinars at Earley and Associates

Earley & Associates has three webinars scheduled for April to May on various aspects and technologies for information management.

+ Sharepoint Case Study with Ford Foundation
+ From Supplier to Consumer - Optimizing the Information Supply Chain in the Retail Industry
+ Taxonomy & Metadata Management in Healthcare

Quoting from the email:

"We are pleased to have three very different events coming up. First up, this Wednesday, is a nuts and bolts discussion about developing a content strategy and IA in SharePoint. Our guest is Nicki Lodico, an Information Management Manager at the Ford Foundation. If you want the inside story on a real life, successful, SharePoint implementation you won't want to miss this session.

At the end of the month some of our top consultants will be discussing how a few leading retailers have been pushing the envelope using taxonomy and metadata to improve efficiency and increase sales. If any part of your business is ecommerce, you will want to join us for this session.

Looking ahead to May, we have Dr. Christian Reich joining us to talk about his experience with inter-relating data coded with disparate vocabularies and classification systems in healthcare systems. Dr. Reich's work is fascinating and you'll want to put this on your calendar no matter what business you are in. "

Details at http://www.earley.com/webinars/upcoming

Winning Intranet Designs

A study on Intranets design and use by Jakob Nielson showed that Intranets do further knowledge management, and that some companies designed interfaces for mobile phones.

10 Best Intranets of 2011 (Jan 4, 2011)

A Canadian law firm got onto the list -Bennett Jones LLP (Canada)=. Verizon and Credit Suisse are on the list for the second time.

+ 60% of winners had a mobile version - they focused on features of greatest importance to their uses.
+ all winners did "knowledge management" well that included six "solutions": knowledge sharing, innovation management (or innovation support), comments from readers, rating systems - involves users and improves rankings, rewards for participation, and employees could customize collections. Many of these are enterprise 2.0 type of features. Intranets include blogs and video sharing and many features to encourage sharing.

Several trends are listed. Of interest - "Better-structured intranets based on task-centered IAs, often breaking up a legacy of information silos", and "Emphasis on search and on initiatives to improve search quality (which continues to suffer on many intranets). "

The 433 page report (which costs $248 ) has 218 screenshots of the winning designs.

Earley Jumpstart Series on Sharepoint

Earley and Associates has a new 4-part jumpstart series starting on Sharepoint 2011 - looking at "best practices for taking information organization and access to new levels, producing much greater value to businesses."

SharePoint 2010 - Architecting for Business Value, Earley and Associates

Topics:

* SharePoint 2010 - Best Practices for Creating Business Value (March 3)
* Methods and Tools for Better SharePoint Search (March 10)
* Practical Approaches to Developing Rich Information Architectures (March 17)
* The Role of Governance in Ensuring Success (March 24)

Free with registration - can't beat that.

SEO Audit, Site Architecture, Taxonomies

Taxonomies are important in website architecture for navigation (as we know) and in search engine optimization.

How To Do An SEO Audit by Michael Martinez, SEO Case Studies,SEO Metrics (March 7, 2011)

In this article about the reasons for conducting an SEO audit on a website and the steps to do so.

Site architecture is arguably one of the most important parts - along with keyword analysis.

"Toponymy defines how things are named. Taxonomy defines how things are organized. Toponymy tells you what keywords are used in the URL and page names. Taxonomy tells you how the folders and sub-domains are sorted and arranged in the site’s hierarchy. Navigation tells you which pages and sections are most important to any page."

Overall, article will be of some interest to the information professional in considering taxonomies, keywords, and content.

Taxonomy makes information findable

The Top 10 Reasons to Create a Taxonomy by Marjorie M. K. Hlava, Information Today - via DocStor (Feb 2011)

Entire article is available for reading - ignore the warning that page 2 is hidden.

Marjorie Hlava is the President of Access Innovations - known for its taxonomy management systems. She gives 10 powerful reasons for adopting and using taxonomies to improve enterprise search.

Visualizing the taxonomy

A thread in a SLA Taxonomy discussion group points to visualization tools for modelling a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary.

Prefuse.org - Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. "

Mind mapping can help. Some tools are:

- XMind> - very versatile tool - use it for brainstorming, or creating topic maps.

- MindJet / MindManager - FreeMind
- NovaMind
- iMindMap

- VisualMind - mind mapping with import / export and search functions.

-The Brain
- MindMeister

If building an ontology is the aim, Knoodl "facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases"

Or TopBraid from TopQuadrant - they say of their product - ""the world's most powerful graphical development environment for modelling data, connecting data sources, and designing queries, rules and semantic data processing chains."

Enterprise Content Categorization

Enterprise content categorization (ECC) is a new term created by Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect of the KAPS Group. He has two articles on this -

1. Enterprise Content Categorization – The Business Strategy for a Semantic Infrastructure
2. Enterprise Content Categorization – How to Successfully Choose, Develop and Implement a Semantic Strategy

Enterprise categorization, he explains in the first article, is an element of the text analytics field (along with text mining, ontologies, sentiment analysis). While these can work together, content categorization done at the enterprise level shows and supports the semantic infrastructure of the enterprise. In the paper he presents a set of core capabilities and features for ECC.

• categorization
• entity extraction
• fact and event extraction
• summarization
• clustering

Taxonomy and controlled vocabulary fit as "related semantic elements" along with metadata and ontologies.

The mission is to reveal the semantic infrastructure. Many organizations, Reamy "do not have a clear idea of what content and/or content structure they have".

There are three dimensions to a semantic infrastructure:

• Content and content structure, such as metadata standards, taxonomies

and other structures.

• Technology, which can include applications such as search and content

management.

• A team of people who are dedicated to maintaining, refining and

facilitating the application of the infrastructure’s various elements.

Enterprise content categorization would lead to cost savings in search and improved content management. Reamy describes ways to accomplish this by adding structure to unstructured content – through categorization, noun phrase extraction, ontologies - and using faceted navigation.

The second paper asks of organizations to have a "deep strategic understanding" of that semantic infrastructure before embarking on employing text analytics and enterprise content categorization.

Text analytics, especially enterprise content categorization software, differs from most other information technologies in that its core capabilities of auto-categorization, auto-summarization and entity extraction have more to do with meaning and semantics than with technology. Furthermore, this software is not designed to be used by itself; rather, it is meant to be used with other technologies such as search and content management.

Reamy summarizes the types of software, and makes points about standalone taxonomy management software, enterprise search, and content management. He next guides the reader - in some detail - through the considerations in undertaking the project from proof of concept, through development

These two papers form a full guide, or even course in how to do it.

Taxonomy Guide - Resource List

An updated version of The Taxonomy Guide is now available from The iSchool Institute of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. This is an online resource and learning tool about why and how to build and implement a taxonomy for an organization. It is available by annual subscription - details at the Institute page, The Taxonomy Guide.

There is a demo site for the Taxonomy Guide with the table of contents and a resource list of books, articles, organizations, and communities for anyone interested in this field.

Learn from the SLA Taxonomy Division

We can learn a lot from the SLA Taxonomy Division's wiki page that lists the SLA Taxonomy-related sessions at the 2010 SLA Conference. PDF versions of several of the presentations are attached to the wiki page: business case, knowledge management, development, content management - more.

Webinars on Taxonomy Uses

ASIS&T is hosting a four-part webinar series on using taxonomies - Taxonomy Uses Webinar Series - on Thursdays, January 27, 2011 to February 17. See the outline of topics and short biographies of presenters.

+ Semantic Integration - Leveraging the Taxonomy
+ Taxonomies in Search
+ Taxonomies in e-Commerce
+ People Directories and Author Networks Based on Taxonomies

Even the outlines will inform.

Identifying second-order metaproperties in classification

Classification, Facets, and Metaproperties, Martin Frické, Journal of Information Architecture (Fall 2010)

" Abstract

The paper argues that second order properties or metaproperties are essential for classification and navigation of information, for example for faceted classification and the navigation it generates. The paper observes that metaproperties, are not accommodated well within such standard schemes as Z39.19, description logics (DLs), and the formal ontologies OWL, BFO, and DOLCE. "

This is a very detailed article with diagrams. Classification specialists will be most interested.

Finding Facets in a Folksonomy

to_be_classified A Facet Analysis of a Folksonomy , Elise Conradi, Journal of Information Architecture (Fall 2010)

The loose tagging that people do in personal indexing of articles can be mined to reveal facets as we see through this article - "This paper illustrates how a facet analysis of a broad folksonomy based on the postulational approach can reveal underlying conceptual categories and facets to which the folksonomy's aggregated tags belong. In this way, facet analysis techniques are used to manually expose a faceted classification ontology in the flat tag space, thus revealing user-generated relationships between information items. "

Postulational approach (in case you are wondering) "to facet analysis refers to a methodology used for both the creation (by a classificationist) and subsequent usage (by classifiers) of a faceted classification scheme."

The study used data from Library Thing, a social networking site for people to catalog their book collections. From an analysis of tags to 76 history books emerged two universes: book and subject, and out of these a discernment of facets that was aided by using the Ranganathan framework of Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time.

Of interest, especially to librarians, is this conclusion - "As will be discussed, the inclusion of users in a faceted classification may provide novel ways to personalize faceted navigation. "

The IA Checklist

Building an Information Architecture Checklist, by Laura Downey and Sumit Banerjee, Journal of Information Architecture (Fall 2010)

This author argues that "IA is foundational and also critical for both users and organizations" - and extends from infrastructure to user interface. This article provides a checklist of architectural aspects to examine and questions to ask.


" Abstract

Government environments often have prescribed complex processes for obtaining and implementing technology solutions. In order to encourage and enable information architecture (IA) in government systems, it is essential to embed IA within the current processes and to view IA as part of the overall architectural framework. The definition of IA used here is broad and inclusive spanning applications, the Web and the enterprise. A common focus exists aimed at organizing information for findability, manageability and usefulness, but the definition also includes infrastructure to support organization of information. This case study describes the development of an IA checklist in a large United States government agency. The checklist is part of an architectural review process that is applied 1) during assessment of proposed information systems projects and 2) design of solution recommendations before system implementation. "

Content Strategist

A taxonomy is a tool for improving access to content but that is only a very small part of much larger scene for managing content. Joe Gollner, author of the Fractal Enterprise blog, describes content strategy as an integrative activity that is needed to bring a variety of practice areas together in creating, managing, and deploying content (primarily web).

He shows the connections through a diagram developed by Richard Ingram in which the content strategist provides input to the information architect and interaction designer. Content strategy, he emphasizes, needs to be focused on the business goals of the organization.



The posting leads to a valuable Google Knol on Content Strategy - "an emerging field of practice". People working in the taxonomy specialty will note this description of a content strategist - "For instance, some specialize in content analysis, which roughly describes work with metadata, taxonomy, search engine optimization, and the ways in which the sound application of these concepts supports content."

It is important to all to keep the big picture of relationships in sight.

Value of Tagging Systems

Tagging Human Knowledge

Paul Heymann, from Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, delivered this lecture about tagging systems and their value. Only 15 minutes long.

"A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness. In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems"

Folksonomy Myths

Tagging Electronic Records - There’s No ‘onomy’ in Folksonomy, Susan Cisco, AIIM ERM Community (Jan 3)

Electronics Records Management requires methods and structure for classifying records and content. A folksonomy of user tags won't really do the job - says Susan Cisco in her blog - as she quotes from Tom Reamy in Folksonomy Folktales 2010 (KMWorld Dec 2010)

Reamy identifies a few myths:

+ Folksonomies are examples of the wisdom of crowds
+ Folksonomies are building bottom-up classification systems
+ Folksomomies are Working
+ Metadata works best when it is free – in the realm of Everyman

Susan Cisco adds from her experience - "My observation of folksonomy use at the enterprise level is that it hasn’t been very successful. Isn’t that what happens when organizations allow end users to organize and maintain records and information without management controls or naming conventions?"

Her recommendation: "A simple taxonomy appears to be a more reliable approach to tagging electronic records."

Plugging Gaps in Sharepoint

SharePoint Partners Can Plug Taxonomy Gaps, Leslie Owens, Forrester (Jan 2011)

It's widely recognized that Sharepoint is weak in supporting metadata and taxonomies even with recent enhancements in Sharepoint 2010. Forrester Research identifies the gaps and reviews the products that can be used to fill them. For fee.