Taxonomy Watch

AIIM in Montreal

2012-01-30T13:03:00.002-05:00

AIIM will be in Montreal on February 21, 2012 to present in French a session on Design and Implemention of Taxonomies. Presenter is Julie Nadeau. More information and registration at

On Organizing Content with Tags

2012-01-27T02:20:00.002-05:00

Thom Johnson at I'd Rather be Writing has been writing a series of posts on findability - or more precisely - organizing content. There are 50 entries since 2010. It's eclectic - simulation, navigation, faceted - and much more. One one Using Tags to Increase Findability explores the value of tags as metadata. He draws from a book by Gene Smith - Tagging, People Powered Metadata for the Social Web.

Digital Workplace

2012-01-25T14:38:00.003-05:00

This post in the VIP LiveWire forum - Can search replace "the perfect secretary"? - alerts us to a growing problem in organizations - that of making decisions based on data. It leads to two major studies: a survey on unstructured data, and one on the digital workplace.

The Swiss-based Infocentric Research published The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age. Its director of research, Stephan Schillerwein, observed that "Searching can take up to two hours of each working day".

Solutions are needed. The Infocentric Research whitepaper on the digital workplace and information management might help.

Introduction to classification

2012-01-13T16:46:00.004-05:00

A Brief History of Classification by Christine Connors, TriviumRLG LLC (Jan 10)

Humans have been classifying for as long as they have used a written language. One of the earliest examples is Pinakes at the Library of Alexandra. This short history takes us up to Ranganathan's Colon Classification in the 1900s, and observes that the first enterprise use was by publishers of indexes. On the web we have seen the classification structures of the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory Project. Today, "Pattern matching is the basis for much of what occurs in these systems for rules based categorization."

Improving enterprise search

2011-12-18T19:53:00.004-05:00

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

2011-12-10T19:31:00.003-05:00

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.http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

More about finding the right solution at Pandia Enterprise Search.

Introduction to taxonomies and thesauri

2011-12-06T18:34:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-02T02:30:00.004-05:00

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

2011-11-19T21:55:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-04T23:45:00.003-04:00

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

2011-11-01T19:17:00.003-04:00

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

2011-10-04T14:09:00.003-04:00

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

2011-09-30T03:01:00.002-04:00

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

2011-09-27T02:43:00.002-04:00

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

2011-09-27T02:35:00.003-04:00

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

Contents:

Semantic technologies
Linked data
Ontologies

Enterprise Search - vendors and trends

2011-09-27T01:49:00.004-04:00

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

2011-09-02T22:34:00.003-04:00

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

2011-08-23T11:32:00.004-04:00

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

2011-08-19T21:55:00.002-04:00

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

2011-08-05T17:31:00.003-04:00

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

2011-07-30T13:38:00.002-04:00

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

2011-07-20T23:56:00.003-04:00

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

2011-07-01T10:42:00.003-04:00

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

2011-06-25T22:38:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-23T17:42:00.002-04:00

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"

2011-06-23T14:05:00.005-04:00

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

2011-06-23T13:53:00.004-04:00

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

2011-06-07T22:27:00.004-04:00

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

2011-06-01T01:44:00.002-04:00

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

2011-05-28T03:39:00.001-04:00

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

2011-05-16T14:06:00.003-04:00

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

2011-04-25T14:49:00.002-04:00

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

2011-04-04T14:11:00.002-04:00

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

2011-03-15T18:12:00.004-04:00

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

2011-03-14T15:02:00.003-04:00

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

2011-03-10T13:06:00.003-05:00

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

2011-02-24T19:16:00.004-05:00

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

2011-02-16T23:28:00.004-05:00

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

2011-02-12T18:24:00.004-05:00

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 -

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

2011-02-12T17:44:00.005-05:00

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

2011-02-03T19:00:00.005-05:00

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

2011-02-03T18:35:00.004-05:00

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

2011-01-31T20:02:00.003-05:00

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

2011-01-31T19:42:00.002-05:00

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

2011-01-31T19:33:00.003-05:00

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

2011-01-31T19:07:00.004-05:00

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

2011-01-20T04:13:00.003-05:00

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

2011-01-18T17:37:00.002-05:00

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

2011-01-15T15:41:00.004-05:00

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.

Pitfall of Search

2010-12-31T19:22:00.004-05:00

Art vs. Information Science, Ryan Tracey, eLearn Magazine (Dec 30, 2010)

The pitfall of search is that the search box makes us think we can see and access everything but it fact it's hardly the size of a mail slot on a door.

When we search we are like Ned Kelly on a horse looking at the horizon seeing only a tiny slice.

Ryan Tracey reflects on the Ted Canberra lecture by Dr Whitelaw who recommends we deal with this problem by showing everything through data visualization techniques. He notes that this may be good for exploring but not necessarily for learning. The learner needs "scaffolding" - a structure to the subject area. This can be provided through "categories and tags". Taxonomies, essentially - and taxonomies built by subject experts. He says (and I agree wholeheartedly), "I still believe in the value of an expert guiding a novice. I maintain the expert has an obligation to contribute his or her expertise to the knowledge repository, and to tag it appropriately."

Article also links to the excellent TedXCanberra lecture.

Promoting Faceted Navigation

2010-12-15T03:10:00.002-05:00

Faceted Navigation: Grouping – An UnTapped Potential?, James Kalback, Experiencing Information (Dec 6)

Apparently the many people still need to be persuaded of the value of faceted organization of results. Kalback describes the merits of facets for improving relevance for the user and refers to Marti Hearst work in the 1990s at Xeroc PARC

The advantage is in the groupings - "The theory is, structuring a results list by clustering items around a topic better reveals “aboutness” of subsets of items, and this in turn potentially increases the chance of relevance. This isn’t only true in academic settings: studies show that grouping results can be of significant benefit in broader contexts on the web. ]"

Gives the World Digital Library as an example of a site that is applying a faceted construction.

Software for Creating A Taxonomy

2010-12-10T02:37:00.004-05:00

Software for Taxonomy Creation and Management by Heather Hedden, FUMSI (Nov 2010)

FUMSI readers are fortunate to have Heather Hedden, author of Accidental Taxonomist, as guest writer at FUMSI. Here she offers a clear and simple guide of software you can use to create taxonomies - whether small where a spreadsheet can serve, to the other extreme of sophisticated large-system thesaurus systems.

Conclusion: "Choice of software should depend on your platform/system architecture, number and location of users, auto-classification needs, import/export capabilities or plug-ins, and the need to integrate with other business software systems."

Primer on semantics

2010-12-09T01:31:00.003-05:00

Semantics in Practice - a primer from Enterprise Search Center (Dec 7)

Semantics - the idea of extracting meaning by analyzing words - is still being much considered to improve search, and soon the art of delivering the right advertisement. This article lays out many of the basics.

Today, a search engine (Bing is given as an example), can interpret our query and deliver a suite of information on travel queries such as a hotel.

"To achieve that vision, producers of content needed to add metadata to information resources. It was critical that data standards and ontologies—that is, formalized vocabularies of terms—were agreed upon so that anyone putting data onto the web could agree that “revenue” in one database was the same as “revenue” in another. There are a number of techniques for doing this, and the applicability of each depends on the complexity and flexibility required by a specific application."

Article gives several current examples and names products and companies.

Building Metadata Into the Filing Systems

2010-11-30T14:00:00.002-05:00

Why Organize When You Can Search?, Jason Tiret, Information Management (Nov 30)

Information professionals have long debated the relative merits of using keyword search versus doing some indexing of key terms - and should those terms by user selected (the tagging we know from delicious) or applied from controlled vocabulary? These issues get picked up in this article in which the author concludes, "Some heavy lifting up front to structure and tag the metadata will greatly optimize the search, retrieval and interrogation of the results for end users."

Using metadata well for indexing depends on planning for development and user access, and making definitions clear. Of course, governance and stewardship are two important principles in maintaining metadata that can be easily used and which will do the job of assisting in retrieval.

Insight Series - Earley and Associates

2010-10-20T18:03:00.002-04:00

Earley and Associates is running an Insight Series of four weekly webinars on integrated global marketing that includes consideration of taxonomy and metadata management. Series begins with It’s All About eTaxonomy - Series Introduction on November 4. Attendance is "free with registration". Sounds like a bargain.

Webinar Series on Business Taxonomies

2010-10-20T17:57:00.003-04:00

ASIS&T and PPC Taxonomy Webinar Series

ASIS&T and the Project Performance Corporation are putting on a four part webinar series on design and management of business taxonomies.

"The first session in the series will provide an introduction to taxonomy and metadata benefits, design concepts, and strategies. The subsequent sessions will detail methodologies on 1) how to run taxonomy design workshops within your own organization, 2) how to design taxonomies from start to finish, and 3) how to ensure the appropriate maintenance and management of those taxonomies over time. "

Dates: Nov 5, 8, 10, and 12, 2010

It's free to ASIS&T members, and $49 US / session for non-members.

Taxonomy does matter

2010-10-04T23:18:00.003-04:00

Does Taxonomy Matter in a New World of Search and Discovery By Suzanne BeDell and Libby Trudell, Online (Sep/Oct, 2010)

This article grew out of a session at the SLA Conference in 2010. Libby Trudell at Dialog and Suzanne BeDell at Elsevier have a breadth of knowledge and experience with methods to aid in information retrieval. They ask - "Do taxonomies still add value when keyword searching seems sufficient to many end users? "

On the scene are

1. semantic technologies for extracting meaning.
2. data mining and analytics
3. natural language and entity extraction (names, places)

"Steps for NLP involve recognizing parts of speech, taking into account contextual information such as proximity. Increasingly, this relationship information is captured as a Resource Description Framework (RDF) triple. RDFs extend the linking structure of the web to use universal resource indicators (URIs) to name the relationship between things as well as the two ends of the link. Yahoo! and Google now include triples in their indexing. "

Collectively these are done better when combined with controlled vocabularies. An "ontology spectrum graphic" is mentioned that would make everything clearer, but it's not included in this free web version of the article.

Using Social Tagging

2010-09-30T13:17:00.003-04:00

Why Social Tagging Isn’t Enough for High Value Content, Seth Earley, Sept 20.

Seth Earley argues that social tagging "would be completely inappropriate when trying to organize high value content. For instance, content used for customer support, marketing processes, asset reuse, or processes with a compliance component."

His earlier posting of Folksonomy vs Taxonomy outlines where social tagging is useful in conjunction with controlled vocabulary (not as a replacement).

Course: Building Internal Competencies in IOA

2010-09-30T13:00:00.005-04:00

Seth Earley presents this 53 minute webinar on Building Internal Competencies in IOA as an orientation to a course that is offered through AIIM.org. The webinar opens by stating the need for taxonomy, metadata, and information framework, and describes the issues surrounding the challenges of findability, of structured and unstructured data. It recommends taking an enterprise view, and applying a discipline of Information Organization and Access (IOA, and paying close attention to usability. Presents a strong argument for taxonomies on unstructured content.

The is an excellent webinar that addresses the current issues in managing information in the enterprise. You may want to take the course.

http://www.slideshare.net/Earley/building-internalcompetenciesinioa-4862181

Earley and Associates partners with AIIM.org to deliver this 4 day course.

"AIIM four day Master Class ... see how your organization's challenges can be dealt with by applying proven techniques and methodologies to solving the toughest information management problems."

Analyzing Data from Card Sorting

2010-09-30T12:34:00.003-04:00

Dancing with the Cards: Quick-and-Dirty Analysis of Card-Sorting Data, Shanshan Ma, UXMatters (Sept 20)

Card sorting can be a good way to learn from users how they group information - to get their perspective on organizing content. It is often used as a step in building a navigational taxonomy. This article describes two types of card sorting: open and closed.

But it does have its challenges. Invariably each person will have a different take on how things should be sorted and the labels to be attached. This article introduces wasy of analyzing the data to see the patterns.

"Card sorting is a great method of understanding users’ interpretations of a Web site’s structure. Through my experiences using card sorting, I have recognized that there are several challenges with using the method—in particular with data analysis and the presentation of results. To address these challenges, my colleagues and I have employed spreadsheets to visually represent card-sorting data and present the results of studies to clients, and we have received positive feedback from them. My experiences have also demonstrated that gathering additional insights from card-sort participants through questionnaires and providing more context for participants add value to the method. User research practitioners should consider enriching the results of their card sorts by taking the approaches I’ve described".

The other taxonomists

2010-09-21T15:16:00.002-04:00

The Globe and Mail has reported on a decline in taxonomists - the kind that classify flora and fauna.

The Case of the vanishing taxonomists by Matthew Hart, Globe and Mail, Sept 4, 2010

Why are there fewer traditional taxonomists who can examine the physical traits in a specimen, classify it and name it? Partly, it's a change to molecular taxonomy.

"Younger scientists are drawn to molecular taxonomy, where powerful new techniques in the study of DNA have revealed interspecies connections never before suspected.

Such advances, including the Canadian-pioneered use of DNA barcodes to identify species, while undeniably useful, are “not a replacement for the [traditional] taxonomist,” says Gary Saunders, who holds a chair in Molecular Systematics and Biodiversity at the University of New Brunswick.

“At times, the DNA-generated answer is wrong,” Prof. Saunders says. “A trained taxonomist can look at a molecular result and know that there is cause to question the outcome.” "

Does this seem similar to the view that content in enterprises does not need to be classified - it can simply be analyzed at the word (molecular) level to be found and used?

Taxonomists in Information Management aren't looking for new species, but they should be looking for new views and new topics that relate to the business and make sense of it.

Determining Classes

2010-08-31T14:04:00.003-04:00

Skills of a Classy Taxonomist, The Taxonomy Blog, (Aug 10)

It appears than taxonomy and ontology are not quite the same but they do have a common base. At a SemTech conference the consensus seems to have been that, "Taxonomists build hierarchies, and ontologists determine classes or categories."

Author goes on to describe the use of class (or facet) analysis.

"Defining classes or ontology work typically precedes building the taxonomy. Defining the classes is like writing a specification for the taxonomy; in fact defining classes is the same as defining facets. The goal of a taxonomist and ontologies should be to define a specific, unambiguous description of a term that helps manage how we find and organize content so the pathways are clear and specific; adding an ontology ensures that the term is placed in the most specific categories to help ensure clarity and lack of ambiguity."

Modelling strategies are needed to do this well. Posting mentions some tools and approaches.

Open Text and Semantic Navigation

2010-08-31T13:24:00.003-04:00

Open Text Launches Semantic Navigation, Open Text press release (Aug17)

Open Text has added semantic search to its enterprise content management software. Search function at corporate websites is notoriously bad. Open Text says that its system uses semantic and context analysis to group content by meaning and make search and browse more productive.

"Open Text Semantic Navigation offers a way to improve the user experience. At the core of the offering is the Open Text Content Analytics engine that intelligently extracts meaning, sentiment and context from content, and in turn marries that content to what a customer or prospect is looking for on a website. The result is that audiences more consistently and quickly find helpful, valuable information with much less effort. "

Globe and Mail will be among the first to use this.

Open Text describes the software in this podcast.

Taxonomy Basics

2010-08-13T12:15:00.003-04:00

Taxonomy: A “Disambiguation”, Content Strategy Noob (Jun 18)

The Content Strategy noob noted that many people are confused about what taxonomy really does, "The confusion", he noted, "centered on how the idea of taxonomy relates to—and differs from—other elements of Information Architecture, such as sitemaps and navigation. Are they the same thing? Is it just your metadata?" Web taxonomies are described with examples and how they are part of the information architecture.

Value of Topic Maps in Design

2010-08-13T12:05:00.003-04:00

Topic Maps - From Information to Discourse Architecture, Lars Johnson, Journal of Information Architecture (Spring 2010)

Detailed treatment on using topic maps in information architecture.

Abstract: "Topic Maps is a standards-based technology and model for organizing and integrating digital information in a range of applications and domains. Drawing on notions adapted from current discourse theory, this article focuses on the communicative, or explanatory, potential of topic maps. It is demonstrated that topic maps may be structured in ways that are “text-like” in character and, therefore, conducive to more expository or discursive forms of machine-readable information architecture. More specifically, it is exemplified how a certain measure of “texture”, i.e. textual cohesion and coherence, may be built into topic maps. Further, it is argued that the capability to represent and organize discourse structure may prove useful, if not essential, in systems and services associated with the emerging Socio-Semantic Web. As an example, it is illustrated how topic maps may be put to use within an area such as distributed semantic micro-blogging [1]. "

Role of Taxonomies in Web 3.0

2010-08-09T12:14:00.003-04:00

Interface: Where We're Headed with Web 3.0, by William Laurent, Information Management Magazine (Jul / Aug 2010)

This is a very rosy prediction about what Web 3.0 will enable in information handling and the role of taxonomies in making it possible.

"Web 3.0 will effectively categorize and present digital information to users in a visually improved manner that enhances interaction, analysis, intuition and search functions. The key driver in this scenario is the concept of taxonomies - standardized and self-describing classifications with codified semantics that are related to one another via highly normalized and descriptive metadata, not by a pastiche of static hyperlinks."

Interest in Taxonomy Growing

2010-08-07T12:13:00.003-04:00

Taxonomy: The New Hip, Miller Montague, Answer Maven (Aug 2)

Interesting post, and interesting blog. Taxonomy is the new hip, says Miller Montague. Yes - we are seeing new books, and more attention in conferences - even a division in SLA. Commenter raised a question about taxonomy being not strong enough to support semantic technology - and that an ontology was required. This may be semantics - though there is the view that the taxonomy is specific to an organization or subject area, and the ontology is for global use.

However, the reply was astute - "Ontologies and Taxonomies aim to bring order to chaos and customizing a company’s own information around their unique language and their cultural needs is why the two are useful."

Talking to people about information

2010-08-01T10:29:00.003-04:00

Part 2: How Do THEY Use Information? Investigating the user information process , Scott Brown, FUMSI (Julu 2010)

This article is not about taxonomies, but people who organize information for others will appreciate this first hand account by Scott Brown on finding out how people get and use information.

His questions: "what DO you do with the information; how does it fit into your overall information process; what value do you get from using the library services?"

From the preface:

"In the second part of Scott Brown's real life case studies on using, reusing, and repurposing information we move into the real Bermuda Triangle. Where exactly does the information go that we, as professionals, provide for our clients/users? What 'use' do they make of it? We all need to show value in the services we provide with tangibility and outcomes being important. Scott also points out that we need to think more about how 'savvy' our users may already be and get ready to partner with them more as it could lead to better outcomes all around."

Ontology Editor

2010-07-20T14:02:00.003-04:00

Need an Ontology Editor? by Stephen Arnold (June 23)

Protégé is open source software for managing word lists and ontologies develooped at Stanford’s Center for for Biomedical Informatics Research.

Facets for Taxonomies

2010-06-24T19:39:00.003-04:00

From Sumo to Samurai: getting your taxonomies fighting fit: Part 1 by Kate Simpson, FUMSI (June 2010)

This FUMSI article follows up on a 2-part piece last year on Designing User-Centred Taxonomies. Kate Simpson takes issue with what she calls Sumo taxonomies (blockbuster big), and proposes more use of facets and faceted search.

"Part 1 of this article - yes, if it's about taxonomies it just seems to need two parts - introduces the concept of facets and the power of faceted navigation and search. A later article will aim to train any of those lumbering Sumo-type taxonomy trees you may have into the fighting-fit warriors of Samurai facets."

Classification systems as we have known them were designed for paper. Facets work better for digital.

SLA 2010 - Taxonomy stream

2010-06-08T23:45:00.003-04:00

People working with taxonomies will want to attend sessions at the SLA 2010 Conference organized by the Taxonomy Division.

From the announcement:

Patrick Lambe asks for your input to a survey on the nature of taxonomy work, he is doing. Please take a look at it at http://tinyurl.com/taxonomywork
Patrick is speaking several times for the Taxonomy Division, often cosponsored with the Knowledge management Division, at the Annual Meeting. The talks include; Presenting a Business Case for Taxonomies, The Future of Knowledge Managers, Taxonomies and Knowledge Management. He is the author of "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness"

Heather Hedden is presenting Taxonomy Made Easy: an Introduction to Taxonomies for the Accidental Taxonomist, June 16. Fitting title as she is the author of a new book "The Accidental Taxonomist" . She will be signing copies of it at the meeting. Published by Information Today Inc., the book has come out just in time for sale at the SLA 2010 Annual Conference. Copies will be available at both the ITI exhibit booth and at the SLA Marketplace area in the conference exhibit hall throughout the duration of the INFO-EXPO. Heather Hedden will be signing copies of her book at the SLA Marketplace during part of the INFO-EXPO "French Quarter" Networking Reception in the exhibits hall. Book details are available at http://www.accidental-taxonomist.com

Marjorie Hlava and Alice Redmond Neal, who have worked with over 200 controlled vocabularies in their careers, are presenting an all day workshop on saturday to provide an introduction or refresher on taxonomies and then an afternoon of implementation strategies from search to portal. Catch up and then expand your knowledge at this session.

Full program is given at the Taxonomy Division wiki - Taxonomy-related Programs & Events

Using Taxonomies in Sharepoint - Do the groundwork

2010-05-17T15:51:00.004-04:00

SharePoint Taxonomy Fairy Dust, Stephen E Arnold, Beyond Search (April 21)

Stephen Arnold examines the claims made in SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Controlled Vocabulary for Content Enrichment by Jeff Carr (one of a series in CMSWire on Taxonomy and Metadata for Sharepoint). Article has screenshots and how-to-use - making it all seem very simple. But Stephen Arnold reminds us that the taxonomy does not miraculously show itself. It requires analysis, understanding of the business and of the users: it's not just a selection from a dropdown menu.

Arnold: "My suggestion is to do some thinking about the nature of the user, the specific information retrieval needs, and the expertise required to do the job to avoid wasting time and money."

Peter Morville on Search

2010-05-09T03:25:00.003-04:00

Peter Morville, co-author of Search Patterns, answers questions in this interview - Customer Behaviour and Business Insights at Bridgeline Digital.

+ Value of faceted search - more of a discovery process
+ Difference between faceted navigation and parametric search
+ Inherent problems in semantic search - we need context to understand meaning

"In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or "ontologies") that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don't scale, and they can't keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge."

+ Using search analytics to improve navigation - " Also, for sites like Etsy.com that combine taxonomy with folksonomy, there's a wonderful opportunity to create a feedback loop. Popular tags should be considered for integration into the taxonomy, to help users navigating within the site and to improve SEO."

Classify your content

2010-05-09T03:15:00.002-04:00

Classification Schemes (When and how to use them) by Donna Spencer, UX Booth (Apr 27, 2010)

Very readable and well illustrated article on simple classification schemes to use to organize content.

Enterprise Search Direction 2010

2010-04-29T15:58:00.002-04:00

Search-based applications support critical decision-making, Enterprise Search (Apr 28)

Data from IDC on the enterprise search market and an overview of technology trends. Although there are several leading companies (Autonomy, Microsoft, Google and Endeca), smaller companies make up 60% of the market.

"Search technology has evolved over the past decade, moving from basic keyword search to more sophisticated enterprise search that includes relevancy ranking, concept searching, clustering and entity extraction. More recently, the emergence of search-based applications has brought a new dimension to search (see chart http://www.kmworld.com/downloads/66062/Search_Market_Map_Chart.pdf). "These applications also employ search as a central component, but they solve a specific business problem or support an information-intensive process," says Feldman, "Search-based applications as a group are growing much faster than enterprise search because their value in accomplishing a task is immediately recognized by business users, because they are quick to deploy, and because they either control costs or increase revenue. Good examples of those are call center support, e-discovery, marketing, sales, R&D research to locate opportunities and e-commerce.""

Intralinks, Endeca, and Metacarta receive a more extended description.

Search Patterns' excerpt on faceted navigation is online

2010-04-26T22:42:00.003-04:00

Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender wrote in their book, Search Patterns, that
"Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade."

We see it mainly in e-commerce, but it can help in many other situations.

Chapter 4 of the book is available at AListApart - Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

"Faceted navigation addresses the universal need to narrow. Consequently, this pattern has become nearly ubiquitous in e-commerce, given the availability of structured metadata and the clear business value of improving product findability. Faceted navigation is being deployed rapidly across an impressively wide variety of contexts and platforms. In the world of search, faceted navigation is everywhere. "

Taxonomy Tools

2010-04-21T15:17:00.001-04:00

Tools for Managing Taxonomies (or Thesauri, or Ontologies) by Heather Hedden, Earley and Associates (March 5)

Good overview of current tools for developing and maintaining a taxonomy - talks about requirements and names tools.

"There is a need for tools that do more than merely enabling manual adding and deleting of terms. Mapping two taxonomies is something that only a few tools support, but there are many other day-to-day taxonomy management activities that also require specialized taxonomy management software."

Book: The Accidental Taxonomist

2010-04-21T14:51:00.002-04:00

The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden is available for preorder at a reduced price.

From the publisher: "Drawing on numerous real-world examples, Hedden explains how to create terms and relationships, select taxonomy management software, design taxonomies for human versus automated indexing, manage enterprise taxonomy projects, and adapt taxonomies to various user interfaces. The result is a practical and essential guide for information professionals who need to effectively create or manage taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri. "

Heather presents sessions and offers workshops at many conferences and has published numerous articles. See her website Hedden Information Management for upcoming presentations and published articles on the Web.

Semantic Digital Libraries

2010-04-07T12:12:00.003-04:00

There are a couple of discoveries from this posting in the SLA LinkedIn Community (Apr 6)

1) Book on Semantic Digital Libraries - Improving Usability of Information Discovery with Semantic and Social Services by Sebastian Kruk

"This book is based on Sebastian's PhD thesis. He reviews architectures, abstract models, metadata standards and various technologies for building digital library management systems. He derives requirements for advanced digital libraries and proposes an architecture model and a set of ontologies for semantic digital libraries. "

Abstract, outline (table of contents), and referenced links are available at the book page.

2) Posting was at the Semantic Digital Libraries Community - this blog by Kruk follows digital library systems, describing them as "an outcome of the synergy between digital libraries, the Semantic Web, and social networking"

Site has several presentations, such as this one on Digital Libraries of the Future: Use of Semantic Web and Social Bookmarking to support E-Learning in Digital Libraries.

Data Harmony moves to cloud

2010-04-02T01:04:00.003-04:00

Achieving Data Harmony in the Cloud, Newsbreaks (April 1)

Work with Access Innovations' suite of tools for thesaurus building, thesaurus maangement, and indexing in the cloud.

"Ven Eman continued, "We're not doing this to be trendy. We believe that SaaS and cloud computing are reliable and ready for customers now. By making our software available over the internet either using a client or a browser, we are making it more convenient for our customers to use. They no longer need to purchase up front and then find a server, IT support, etc. They can begin using products such as Data Harmony and its suite of taxonomy management tools including Thesaurus Master, MAIstro, and XIS immediately," he explained."

Thesaurus Management - Semantic Web

2010-03-24T14:59:00.006-04:00

This looks interesting - PoolParty, a company in Austria, has developed software for creating and managing a thesaurus. It supports SKOS and can be used to analyze text and do "semantic indexing".

PoolParty is a thesaurus management system and a SKOS editor for the Semantic Web including text analysis functionalities and linked data capabilities. The system helps to build and maintain multilingual thesauri providing a simple user interface and a couple of semantic services. PoolParty can be used to implement semantic search or can be integrated into existing systems like CMS, DMS or Wikis.

There are several screencasts and screenshots to demo the product. Registered users have access to a full demo. As well there is this very useful page on Application Scenarios and Use Cases.

Sharepoint and taxonomies

2010-03-24T12:18:00.003-04:00

Earley and Associates has a webinar on using taxonomies with Sharepoint coming up on March 30,2010. This is part of a "free vendor showcase" series.

Optimizing Your SharePoint Deployment
Developing a complex controlled vocabulary is a large time investment. A hierarchical taxonomy is a necessity for users to navigate and find information, but it's a loss if you are not able to implement effectively in SharePoint.

Learn how to make search more successful and leverage taxonomy and ontologies in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 with Semaphore in our next Vendor Showcase: SharePoint Search.

Date: Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 Eastern Time
Cost: Free

Search Harmony

2010-03-05T00:30:00.002-05:00

Taxonomy enhanced search software at Perfect Search Corporation.

"Search Harmony is taxonomy enhanced search that includes hierarchical browse navigation, automatic query completion using taxonomy terms and their synonyms, contextual presentation of related terms to broaden the search and narrower terms to refine the search, spell check, "more like these" sets, and recursive searches. Based on Access Innovations' MAIstro automatic indexing and thesaurus software suite, it provides well formed data and highly accurate search results. Used on top of search software, it provides the best of breed in recall, precision, and relevance searching. "

Time for Enterprise Tagging

2010-03-02T16:29:00.001-05:00

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work? By Stephanie Lemieux, Earley and Associates, User Interface Engineering (Mar 1 2010)

"But just what is social tagging in the enterprise: a cheap solution to information organization in difficult economic times, giving people the tools they love at home to use at work, or just a faddish attempt to incorporate "cool web 2.0 stuff" into the enterprise context?"

Explains what tagging in enterprise context would mean and names some benefits.

Semantic Technology Uses for Financial Services

2010-02-24T17:21:00.004-05:00

Semantics in Financial Services Presentation, Daniela Barbosa Chitchatting about Information Delivery,(Jan 18)

Semantic web technology is sweeping through organizations as more and more companies show how it can be used.

Here Daniela Barbosa points us to a presentation done at a meetup in San Francisco on Semantics in Financial Services with David Newman, a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank/Wachovia.

Categorization, ontologies, data schemas are some of the parts.

Semantics in Financial Services -David Newman

View more presentations from Peter Berger.

The slideshow goes through

+ benefits
+ semantic technology: ontology, basic principles, basic concepts
+ some providers and adopters
+ use cases
+ recommended books and journals.

H5 EDGE Classifier

2010-02-17T16:28:00.002-05:00

H5 Introduces H5 EDGE™ Classifier for Enterprise Information Governance, press release, H5 (Jan 27, 2009)

"SAN FRANCISCO – January 27, 2010 – H5, a leading provider of automated information retrieval products and services, today announced the availability of the H5 EDGE™ Classifier, the first of its Electronic Data Governance Engine (EDGE) products for the enterprise. Developed in response to the growing market need for more effective information classification technologies and client demand for H5’s accurate assessments behind the firewall, H5 EDGE Classifier gives companies the ability to make highly accurate, automated decisions on information using their existing technology infrastructures."

Schemas and vocubalaries

2010-02-09T13:54:00.002-05:00

Here are two resources that may help people in using schemas to build taxonomies.

Schemaweb.info/ - " SchemaWeb is a directory of RDF schemas expressed in the RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL schema languages. SchemaWeb is a place for developers and designers working with RDF. It provides a comprehensive directory of RDF schemas to be browsed and searched by human agents and also an extensive set of web services to be used by software agents that wish to obtain real-time schema information whilst processing RDF data. "

Vocab.org/ - " A URI space for vocabularies"

Thanks to SLA Taxonomy Wiki

Taxonomy Boot Camp - Call for Speakers

2010-02-09T12:51:00.002-05:00

Taxonomy Boot Camp will be November 15 to 16, 2010 - Making it Real: Getting Value, Support & Usage from Taxonomies. The organizers have issued a call for speakers to submit proposals for sessions. Deadline for submission is April 24.

A hybrid semantic Web MDM approach

2010-01-17T23:29:00.003-05:00

The Semantic Web: A Perfect Complement to Master Data Management Initiatives by J. Brooke Aker, Information Management (Jan 11)

To manage information this article proposes a hybrid of the "master data management" for defining business entities and semantic technologies to uncover unstructured data.

"Implementation-wise, semantic Web technologies allow IT managers to integrate master data without needing to understand the data model or writing complex SQL statements. Additionally, the semantic Web offers quick and precise data analysis for enterprise users to manage and discover relationships among master data based on semantic modeling and reasoning."

Designing for Faceted Search

2009-12-11T15:37:00.002-05:00

Special Report – Designing for Faceted Search By Stephanie Lemieux (with Seth Earley & Associates) Altsearchengines (Dec 2009)

This article, originally published in KMWorld March 2009, is reproduced with diagrams and illustrations in AltSearchEngines. Article has good, practical advice for designing for faceted search.

Portfolio of articles on Taxonomies and Tagging

2009-12-09T02:20:00.003-05:00

The FUMSI Folio on Taxonomies and Tagging looks to be a useful reference for taxonomists. This is a collection of articles on taxonomies and tagging practices published in October 2009. Only $64 US.

Table of Contents:

* Editorial Introduction by Karen Loasby, Contributing Editor, Manage
* Taxonomies and Tagging Survey Results
* Creating User Centred Taxonomies: Part One, by James Kelway
* Creating User Centred Taxonomies: Part Two, by James Kelway
* Folksonomies: Business Use, by Fran Alexander
* Automatic Classification: A Panel Discussion, by Karen Loasby
* Image Findability: Improving through Tags, by Ian Davis
* Becoming a Taxonomist: Real Life Stories, by Karen Loasby
* Recommended Resources

Digital Asset Management and Metadata for Images and Video

2009-11-27T07:15:00.005-05:00

This piece was previously posted on - 'Ian Davis - managing information'

Missing out on the recent Photo Metadata Conference - http://bit.ly/6PlLJj - has reminded me how much I love working in the DAM world, in particular in the area of creating metadata and controlled vocabularies to support digital image and video search and browse.

Reading about the Photo Metadata Conference programme it seems like there were some great presentations. I downloaded them all, they're available from the conference website, and had great fun going through all the excellent experiences, comments and ideas.

I wish I'd been there for Madi Solomon's keynote on the collapse of boundaries in the digital world. I agree that it's less and less about what format an asset is in and more about what that asset is, and how it needs to be organised to support its use.

Assets need to work for their places in the world. Finding them and using them needs to be simpler, and metadata and controlled vocabularies need to support and enable this.

Understanding the assets an organization has, analysing the needs of that organisation, and ensuring they have what they need and that each asset is organised to support its use, is where the really exciting and satisfying work is for me.

After having worked for Corbis from 1991 to 1999, in the early research and development days of digital image organisation and sale, I was excited to see Max Wieberneits presentation on still and video metadata.

Video and still images have much in common. I've blogged about this in the past and it's still a big area for me. Both asset types have technical metadata, depicted content metadata and aboutness metadata, to name but a few. Add to this the sound tracks for video - which can be indexed for retrieval, and the ability to segment video into scenes and key frames, and you have an exciting mix of metadata across both formats.

I agree with Max that using established metadata systems makes a huge amount of sense, as does working to get as much metadata as possible from the creators or custodians of images and video - it's much easier to capture metadata early on in the creation process than down the line, and some metadata will be lost if you leave its capture too late.

As Max says, one key concern for image and video asset metadata is the users of the assets. Different people have different needs and need different metadata. For many people a good level of access to video can be built using initial metadata associated with the videos, key scene and frame analysis and the indexing of the audio tracks of the videos. Whereas for others, access to the mood of the video may only come through music analysis, lack of noise at key moments, and manually applied subject tags.

On the image side, as Max says, editorial users have somewhat differing needs to commercial users of stock photos. Max showed a great slide listing a long set of conceptual keywords: 'comfortable, dreaming, luxury, spoiled' etc. I remember the fun we had creating these concepts, arranging them in hierarchies, providing synonyms for them, and creating definitions and application rules to control how they're assigned. It sounds easy, but trying to accurately use a concept like, "spoiled" or "luxury" often brings many challenges.

I've already touched on the needs of video users, and some of the basic ways video can be organised. It was great to read Lionel Faucher's piece on how a video agency uses metadata. Video is easier than still images to work with, automated solutions are more applicable to video and much more successful, but challenges still abound, as Lionel clearly shows in his presentation.

One of the interesting topics I've been following for a while is the metadata being generated from digital cameras, and the work being done to make more use of it. Related to this is the exciting area of geographic coordinate metadata, which is created by some digital cameras when a photo is taken, and the uses to which that can be put.

Two presentations in the area of geography and image metadata were given by Bern Beuermann, and Ross Purves. A great research area was mentioned by Bernd - the taking of GPS co-ordinates and linking them to points of interest that are within a certain range of a GPS location. This can make the tagging of images with key depicted buildings, or topography a little easier and will produce many advantages for image tagging and retrieval..

A couple of things that I'm interested in were missing from the conference. I'd have liked to have seen more on: working with video soundtracks, automatic scene and frame analysis, and the place of manually applied tags in video indexing. I'd also like to have seen more about the creation of hybrid image retrieval systems that bring together content based image retrieval with controlled vocabulary and folksonomy tags. Maybe that's all for next year!

There also seemed to have been a big emphasis on technology, file formats, and metadata standards - in many ways the building blocks or key tools for organising and providing access to video and image content. What I'd have liked to see more of is the uses to which these building blocks have been put, the real world sharing of user needs and the challenges of actually making the technology and the supporting structures work to achieve business aims.

I should end by thanking the organisers of the event, and the presenters, for putting so many presentations online - it's very helpful and refreshing to have such a good level of access to this form of content.

One way in which I keep involved in the image and video world is through my involvement in the DAM Foundation on Linkedin. There is a coffee meet-up organised for this afternoon, which I hope will kick start a lot of exciting developments. I'll post more about the outcome of the meeting next week.

Ian

Taxonomies and new technology

2009-11-23T22:28:00.003-05:00

The Death of Taxonomies, revisited by Theresa Regli, CMS Watch (Nov 13)

Technology of text mining, entity extraction and semantic analysis is doing the grunt work of taxonomists. Theresa Regli foresees change in the life and work (and even name) of the taxonomist.

"Taking taxonomies beyond what technology can achieve on its own is the metadata architect’s challenge for the next decade, because technology is at the point where it achieves what taxonomists were doing a decade ago."

Nstein Semantic Search

2009-11-22T13:53:00.003-05:00

Nstein Technologies Launches Semantic Site Search, press release, NStein (Nov 17)

"Nstein Technologies Inc. www.nstein.com (TSX-V: EIN), a leader in digital content management solutions for information-rich enterprises, today announced the release of a new product, Semantic Site Search (3S). “3S is a front-end, multi-index search engine designed to provide users an unparalleled search experience,” said Nstein CTO Jean-Michel Texier. 3S leverages Nstein’s patented text-mining technology to power a faceted site search which returns highly accurate results that are organized categorically."

Text Analytics to Help in Classification

2009-11-12T15:07:00.003-05:00

Rise of the Machines: The Role of Text Analytics in Record Classification and Disposition by James Santangelo, Information Management, ARMA (Nov/Dec 2009)

Classification is essential but may be overwhelming to staff. Because of the volume automated classification is needed - and text analytics software can help.

"The latest advancements in text analytics use sophisticated techniques to determine the conceptual meanings within each file to compensate for shortcomings and extend the functionality of the applications that use policy rule engines. Use of text analytics greatly increases the accuracy of the classification by interpreting the meaning of terms in their context instead of being limited by the character strings inherent in policy rule engines."

Text Analytics

2009-11-12T14:50:00.003-05:00

Text Analytics Gains a Broader Audience in the Enterprise by Paula J. Hane, IT Newslinks (Nov 2)

Text analytics is becoming more important to search. As this article explains:

"Text analytics extracts key information from unstructured text and helps to retrieve otherwise hidden information. It is a key component of many customer relationship management (CRM) applications, as well as for media and publishing, competitive intelligence, reputation monitoring, e-discovery, compliance, and financial analysis. Because of this, we've seen a number of acquisitions of text analytics firms by larger search companies (Business Objects acquired Inxight, Reuters acquired ClearForest, SAS acquired Teragram, and IBM acquired SPSS) and an increased pace of product and service rollouts."

It's really automatic tagging. Susan Feldman said of one vendor, TEMIS:

""It's clear that text analytics has taken off as a hot market, and TEMIS' expansion of its US business underlines this fact." "As the volume and flow of information increases, publishers and corporations are turning to automation to tag their content to make it findable, to understand what their customers are saying, to monitor trends and opinions about their products and their companies. That's impossible, given the exponential growth of information that needs to be processed, unless the process is automated." "

OpenCalais is amazing

2009-11-11T16:12:00.004-05:00

Learn About and Try OpenCalais (a Free Service from Thomson Reuters), ResourceShelf (Nov 6)

OpenCalais is making a dent in use of semantic technology to extract entities and topics from text.

"In a nutshell, OpenCalais uses semantic technology and natural language processing to analyze text and add metadata by drawing out entities from documents, blog posts, news stories, etc. In some cases, ths type of data can identify or help identify relationships between people, businesses, etc."

This post gives an example of what it can do, and points to the OpenCalais viewerbox where we can try it for ourselves - take a substantial story from an online news site and see the types of data that Calais can extract and organize.

Explore to see the power of the tool. Will we need taxonomies if we have tools like OpenCalais?

Further, we can have this at our fingertips for content we follow with Feedly, a Firefox plugin.

Feed(ly)ing The Enterprise, by Jennifer Zaino, Semantic Web (Nov 9)

"For one thing, it’s the semantic technology embedded within Feedly, which uses the OpenCalais web service to get a clean representation of metadata behind content. That gives power to enterprise users such as marketing professionals, who might be subscribed to various blogs and feeds and services and different content that’s relevant to their brand."

Endeca - Aiming for integrated search/BI

2009-10-30T22:27:00.003-04:00

Endeca Stresses Simplicity With New Partnerships by Theresa Cramer, Newsbreaks (Oct 29)

Endeca is partnering with Informatica and SAP in a bid to integrate search with business intelligence.

"Under the terms of the OEM agreement, Endeca will integrate Xcelsius software, SAP BusinessObjects Intelligent Search software, PowerCenter, and PowerExchange into the Endeca Information Access Platform. These partnerships will address two very different issues for Endeca and its customers, says Sonderegger."

Inxight, now part of SAP, turns up in this too.

"There is also a little something in this new partnership for Endeca's intelligence customers, namely, the licensing of SAP's query federation tool, Inxight SmartDiscovery Awareness Server. Intelligence customers will be able to send off a query about "uranium enrichment," for example, to multiple information sources such as Endeca applications, proprietary databases, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and expect to see results in one screen. "This comes straight from the traditional search world," says Sonderegger. "We've added our own twist. ... When results come back, the analyst will be able to do faceted browsing across search results.""

The Taxonomists Career

2009-10-30T17:04:00.002-04:00

Becoming a Taxonomist: Real Life Stories by Karen Loasby, FUMSI (Oct 2009)

Four information taxonomists tell their career stories - Heather Hedden, Helen Lippell, Dorothy Tuma and Stephen D'Arcy. We see a mix of indexing, information architecture, information management. There are many backgrounds, such as Dorothy's "In addition to abetting my creative avocations, getting my MFA taught me to think about concepts, meaning, semantics, aboutness, and implicit versus explicit meaning. "

Information Access Technology from Gartner

2009-10-30T12:27:00.003-04:00

Gartner has issued its 2009 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology (Sept 2009)

The overall description is a fair representation of enterprise search technology today. Selecting the vendor is only one step. A much larger one is to make the technology meet an organization's information needs - an endeavour that takes much planning and much adaption of both the technology and the organization.

"This Magic Quadrant assesses vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of technologies. Their capabilities include: search; federated search, content analytics, such as content classification, categorization and clustering, fact and entity extraction, taxonomy creation and management, information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop search to address user-controlled repositories to locate and "invoke" documents, data and e-mail."

Gartner included vendors that have search as the foundation piece. It notes that "Many include other capabilities such as autocategorization, taxonomy functions and clustering, but we excluded those that offer only these capabilities, with no search."

Companies to note: Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Recommind, Vivisimo. (There are others.)

Unfortunately the report does not describe the specific capabilities of the vendors.