Taxonomy makes information findable

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

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

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

Visualizing the taxonomy

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

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

Mind mapping can help. Some tools are:

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

- MindJet / MindManager - FreeMind
- NovaMind
- iMindMap

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

-The Brain
- MindMeister

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

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

Enterprise Content Categorization

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three dimensions to a semantic infrastructure:

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

and other structures.

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

management.

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

facilitating the application of the infrastructure’s various elements.

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

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

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

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

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

Taxonomy Guide - Resource List

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

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

Learn from the SLA Taxonomy Division

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

Webinars on Taxonomy Uses

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

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

Even the outlines will inform.