Teragram for managing ontologies

Ontology management, taxonomy development, Enterprise Search Center (Nov 28, 2007)

"Teragram has unveiled Semantic Term Manager (STM) 2.0, software that enables management of content and maintenance of ontologies in enterprise content repositories and databases. STM 2.0 is designed to help corporate librarians maintain ontologies and integrate this information directly with Teragram’s TK240 taxonomy management tool. The combination of these two programs allows knowledge workers to maintain metadata across repositories and databases and to automatically tag documents according to the defined taxonomies. These tools help to simplify the enterprise search and retrieval process, says the company."

Enterprise Search: Information Architecture that includes users

"Enterprise Search: Rethinking it in a Web 2.0 World" By Jayne Dutra, Freepint (Nov 29, 2007)

Jayne Dutra is the Lead Enterprise Information Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. She understands the importance of information architecture and the need to engage users in tagging content as well.

Users are in the habit now to add "metadata" to describe what something means to them and how this can be useful to others. But that alone won't be sufficient.

"Successful enterprise search today doesn't mean making keywords work well. It means creating a holistic information architecture designed for the enterprise that allows input and evolution by the users themselves. Ironically, this usually relies on the time honored and humble practice of generating metadata and controlled vocabularies that enable data connectedness and intuitive recall. For years, we've heard that users won't fill out metadata fields. Then how does one account for the phenomenal success of Flickr? If one enters a set of bookmarks in del.icio.us, doesn't that tell us something about the person's interests and background? New Web 2.0 technologies generate metadata in the wild that can be domesticated if we are wily enough to recognise the opportunity."

Dutra also argues for installing the foundation pieces - specifically the creation of a "metadata core specification" and an associated taxonomy.

"The ultimate goal is an information environment enhanced by metadata and served up through a number of rich user interactions facilitated by role based access. "

Recommind does Federated Search

Recommind Enhances MindServer With Deep Federated Search Framework, Newsbreaks (Nov 19, 2007)

"Recommind (www.recommind.com), a provider of enterprise search, automatic categorization, and eDiscovery systems for law firms and enterprises, announced the availability of the MindServer 5.1 platform, which combines robust navigation and grouping controls over external content with multilayered security to deliver a federated search framework. This latest version of Recommind’s flagship MindServer enterprise search platform is designed to bring the full potential of federated content to organizations."

Weinberger on organizing digital information

David Weinberger answered questions about his book, Everything is Miscellaneous, in an interview with Hugh McKellar, KMWorld (Nov 1, 2007)


He explained that he doesn't mean miscellaneous as a jumble of things that are unrelated to each other but as "the aggregation of everything, with the important difference that with the digital miscellaneous, we find all sorts of ways that the things are alike, all sorts of connections and relationships". He believes in the power of user tagging - of using the relationships that people identify as the means for finding information in an enterprise.

"Tagging systems let the users of information decide how they’re going to think about that information, or what that information means to them. Tagging within the corporation is potentially a very powerful tool for sharing knowledge and for enabling social networks to emerge around shared expertise."

On being asked if this replaces the traditional top-down taxonomies, Weinberger comes very close to saying yes, although in the end he seems to see them as being complementary.

"The real importance of a folksonomy is that it retains much more information than the traditional top-down taxonomy does. The top-down taxonomy only knows, typically, that x is a member of y and y is a member of z. With a folksonomy, you know that 17 percent of people think of x as a member of y, but 23 percent think of it as a member of q, and 42 percent of them think that it’s really the same thing as an x." ... "The folksonomy doesn’t have to replace the taxonomy with another static set of categories. It can instead allow the people who are in the minority a way of thinking about something to search the way that they want to. The folksonomy can surface those minority relationships."


Follow David Weinberger's musings about the organization of information at his blog Everything Is Miscellaneous.com/. The main page also has links to interviews, videos, and podcasts with Weinberger.

Professor Michael Wesch's video Information R/Evolution is especially recommended as it brings home the point that organizing digital information is much different to what civilization worked out for paper.