Meta-tagging in the office

The EnterpriseSearch blog by Mike Kehoe has entries on taxonomies as well as many enterprise search vendors such as Endeca, Microsoft, IBM.

He seems to favour user tagging but when combined with some forethought on types of metatags. In this article from 2004 he recommends a full study to determine what tags would be best used. 5 Steps to Better Tagging

Enterprise Search Sourcebook

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

The Enterprise Search Sourcebook for 2008 is available in e-book format is available through Nxtbook.com.

This is a free resource with a great range of articles about search tools and practices for the enterprise. A few sections of note:

+ Why enterprise search will never be Google-y
+ Enterprise search: trends for 2008
+ E-Discovery essentials: the rules you need to know
+ Sharepoint Search: an enterprise contender?
+ A natural search solution

There are 102 pages in total. Can save the entire book for offline viewing or print sections.

Taxonomy Boot Camp

Full conference details for Taxonomy Boot Camp 2008 are available at the website.

Organizing Information for Search & Discovery
September 25-26, 2008
San Jose McEnery Convention Center - San Jose, CA

Keynote speakers are:

• Peter Morville, President, Semantic Studios, and author, Ambient Findability
• Leslie Owens, Analyst, Forrester

Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook

Free Taxonomy & Folksonomy Book Posted by Oliver Marks in ZDnet (July 23)

Points us to a great new book by Daniela Barbosa of Synaptica at Dow Jones Client Solutions, ‘The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the right recipe for organizing enterprise metadata‘. She samples "the different flavors of how enterprises can incorporate social tagging into their taxonomies".

The objective is to get the best of the discipline of the prepared taxonomy and the involvement of social taggers in building knowledge and enhancing findability.

"Fortunately, the taxonomy versus folksonomy issue is not an “either/or” debate, but an opportunity for mutual progress. By combining the virtues of each approach into a working hybrid model, the enterprise can achieve its goal: a user-friendly system that encourages collaboration and makes information easier to find."

Has many "recipes".

The e-book is online and free with registration.

State of Enterprise Search

AIIM Study Finds Enterprise Search Still Lacking By Ron Miller, EContent (Jun 27, 2008 )

"A study conducted by AIIM in May has found that enterprise search is still lags behind consumer-oriented search when it comes to helping people find the information they need inside the firewall, but enterprise employees may have unreasonable expectations based on their experiences on the consumer web."

Entity Extraction

13 Powerful Entity Extraction Techniques from the Enterprise Search blog (June 23)

Lists 13 techniques that entity extraction systems use.

The blog is managed by Miles Kehoe of New Idea Engineering - a resource to watch.

KMWorld's Enterprise Search 2008

KMWorld Enterprise Search, Vol IV [May 2008] features articles on best practices in enterprise search.

Contents:

+ The Enterprise Search "Essay Test" by Andy Moore
+ What Makes Search Great? by Susan Feldman
+ Text Analytics for Enterprise Search - The Essential Components for High Performance Systems by Dr. Johannes Scholtes
+ Access With Security Safely - Improve Knowledge Worker Efficiency with Secure Search
by John McCormick
+ Making Connections - Search and Content: Keys to a Better Customer Experience by Jason Hekl
+ The Path to Universal Search by Vijay Koduri
+ New Equation for Findability by Michael Schmitt
+ Jump-Starting Collaboration with Social Search by Jerome Pesenti
+ The New Frontier—Capturing User Context by Harald Jellum , Trond Lein , Mikael Svenson
+ Search’s Critical Role in Litigation Preparedness by Craig Carpenter
+ Search is an Iterative Process by Ian Davies
+ Your Customers Can Search, But Do They Find? by Nitin Badjatia
+ Whither Enterprise Search?Enterprise search is undergoing rapid transformation. What was once seen... by Martin Muldoon
+ Enterprise 2.0 and Search - Serious Results from Light Tooling by Hadley Reynolds , Zia Zaman
+ Mastering a Key Challenge of Enterprise Search - Put Structured Data at Employees’ Fingertips by Matthias Weber
+ The Forgotten Search Solution - When you buy a new home, one of the first things you set out to do is decorate it... by Dr. Shaun Ryan
+ Five Ways to Waste a Million Dollars - After years of false starts and uncertain strategies for knowledge management... by Rob Guilbert
+ The Enterprise Search "Essay Test"—Extended Remix

Forrester paper on Information Classification

Information Classification Must Reach Beyond Knowledge Management "There Are Many Faces Of Information Classification" by Paul Stamp, Barry Murphy, Stephanie Balaouras with Matthew Brown, Diana Levitt. Forrester (October 2007)

A free report from Forrester for Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals. There are several critical reasons for classifying information in addition to information retrieval — "such as ensuring security, implementing a retention policy, and optimizing the use of storage". "Now is the time for I&KM professionals to sync up with security and IT operations professionals to identify and then augment existing classification policies. Create a classification template that meets the 80/20 rule, enabling all team members to quickly classify about 80% of information in the organization."

ASI Taxonomies SIG

The American Society for Indexing (ASI) added a special interest group on taxonomies. ASI is expanding "its interests beyond traditional back-of-the-book indexing".


"The Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies SIG is for those in the indexing profession who are involved in creating or editing taxonomies, thesauri, or controlled vocabularies used for indexing. Members may be either as freelancers/consultants or employees of companies that develop taxonomies or controlled vocabularies for externally offered information sources. The SIG's founder and current manager is Heather Hedden, currently a taxonomist at Viziant Corporation and formerly a controlled vocabulary editor at Gale (Cengage Learning). The SIG's Yahoo discussion group is "taxonomies." It also has a web site: www.taxonomies-sig.org."

Synaptica upgrades

Dow Jones Introduces Enhanced Business Semantic Management Tool, Synaptica Press Release, Dow Jones (May 26)

Dow Jones & Company has added function to Synaptica, "its business semantic management tool" - Synaptica is presented as a tool "that simplifies the process of organizing an enterprise's information assets, putting news, research and other critical internal information within easy reach of employees". These technology investments in Synaptica further build on the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group's commitment to "Powering the Intelligent Enterprise."

Among the upgrades are a few that related to taxonomies or use of controlled vocabulary for finding information.

o "Semantic Web standardization and Web services integration: Clients can integrate informal social tagging with structured enterprise vocabulary management."

o "Enhanced adding and editing of term relationships: Simple drag-and-drop editing with side-by-side windows makes managing and editing vocabulary hierarchies much easier, eliminating the need for multiple screens."

o "Improved global term editing: Clients save time finding, creating and editing multiple terms with a new one-step process".

Information about Syntaptica and taxonomies: http://solutions.dowjones.com/djcs/index.asp