Recommended: Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2007

Information Today announced the publication of an e-book for this year's publication of Enterprise Search SourceBook thanks to sponsorship by Endeca. It can be found at http://www.enterprisesearchcenter.com/.

+ Seth Earley has an article on Taxonomies, MetaData and search.
+ Peter Morville is interviewed in Enterprise Search and the Future of Findability
+ Susan Feldman writes on Search, The Quiet Revolution.
+ Francois Bourdoncle, CEO of Exalead, wrote Transform your Intranet into a Source of Knowledge.

There is also an index to advertisers and a showcase area for vendors.

I found the easiest way to navigate was to use the Contents button in the e-book control menu to get to articles, and then to set the view to single page at 100% for reading. Fortunately, it is possible to selectively print pages.

This e-book is a substantial resource on enterprise search for the variety of topics, the excellent writers, and the size - 124 pages.

Metadata helps keyword search

Montague Institute Review has an excellent article on the use of a variety of retrieval tools to enhance the findability of information at a web site.

Web site makeover: Legacy retrieval tools save time for users (March 2007)

The article examines the U.S. Supreme Court web site and presents a careful analysis of the audience for this site, alternative sources of information, and a makeover that would incorporate the best from each.

The main point: "it's time to rethink legacy retrieval tools in a Web context and consider a metadata repository as the implementation vehicle".

FAST buys Convera's RetrievalWare

FAST Acquires Convera’s RetrievalWare Business by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 9, 2007)

Convera Corp has sold its RetrievalWare business to FAST. This gives FAST extra strength in the enterprise search market along with large number of client departments in the U.S. government.

"Convera was formed in December 2000 through the combination of the former Excalibur Technology Corp. and Intel’s Interactive Media Services Division. Excalibur had previously merged with Conquest in the mid-1990s."

The announcement states that FAST won't be developing RetrievalWare any further, but will "port" some capabilities from it to FAST's platform.

"However, according to Bauert [Peter Bauert, senior vice president of corporate development at FAST], RetrievalWare does offer some desirable features and functionality that FAST does not have now. He explained: “An example of a feature that we intend to ‘port’ from RetrievalWare to FAST ESP is the way that Convera is doing semantic mining using ontologies and taxonomies. While FAST already supports ontologies/taxonomies, Convera’s customers are used to a tool called the KnowledgeWorkbench and we intend to make that available to the customers as they migrate to FAST ESP.”"

Inxight Extracts Metadata

Inxight Launches SmartDiscovery Metadata Management System, EContent (Apr 3, 2007)

"Inxight Software, a provider of enterprise software solutions for information discovery, has launched the Inxight SmartDiscovery Metadata Management System (MMS), designed to allow users to review, cleanse, and augment automatically extracted metadata--the entities, relations, and event data trapped in electronic text."

New taxonomy at CIO.com

CIO.com has embraced many of the new Web 2.0 qualities in its revamped web site. CIO is published by IDG and appeals to the business and IT community; and now, with these improvements, it will be its own community.

Of note, are two navigational devices:

1) A new taxonomy covering technology and leadership.


2) A Google Custom Search that searches the CIO.com domain for content, and offers some standard tags for viewing the content: blogs, white papers, webcasts, advice/opinion.

Among the Web 2.0 elements are polls, RSS feeds, blogs with readers' comments and discussion.

Vendors will have more opportunity to add content, such as white papers and articles. Search for taxonomies as a start.

Taxonomy Warehouse Update

Factiva has three new partners for the Taxonomy Warehouse. These are Cycorp, Ibuki, and Intellisophic. These are all featured on the main page. The Taxonomy Warehouse now offers 650 taxonomies produced by nearly 300 publishers in 40 languages and in 73 subject areas. [Source: Information Today, p 41. March 2007)

Using The Thesaurus of Aging Terminology

The Thesaurus of Aging Terminology 8th Edition (July 2005) is available online from AARP (formerly American Association of Retired Persons).

This is a good application for seeing how the thesaurus has been constructed and how it is used to assist in finding materials in the AgeLine Database of articles and studies.

Thesaurus - http://www.aarp.org/research/ageline/thesaurus.html

"The Thesaurus of Aging Terminology is a controlled vocabulary of subject terms (also called keywords or descriptors) used to index all publications cited in AgeLine. Because AgeLine focuses on aging-related topics from a variety of disciplines, the Thesaurus can be very useful in constructing a thorough search of the database, in defining how a term is used in AgeLine, and in identifying references having a major focus on that topic."

It is not the easiest to use. Basically, browse the PDF version of the thesaurus (272 pages), note terms you'd like to use, and do a copy and paste into the AgeLine search form.

"The Thesaurus of Aging Terminology is divided into three sections: Relational Terms, Rotated Terms, and Geographical Terms. The Relational Terms section indicates all levels of relationship among Thesaurus terms. The Rotated Terms section provides an alphabetized columnar listing of all words found within Thesaurus terms. The Geographical Terms section provides a ready reference list of state, province, country, regional, and continent names searchable as Descriptors."

AgeLine Database - http://www.aarp.org/research/ageline/index.html

Search Ageline - there are several options - basic keyword, subject, and multiple options. It covers a great range of aging topics related to health, living, and well being.

Watch for the Descriptors on articles that are displayed, and navigate to other topics.

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2006 Presentations

Two PowerPoint presentations from sessions at the Taxonomy Boot Camp 2006 conference are available from Conference Buzz. There is a short recap of the two days plus:

+ Taxonomy 101 by Marjorie Hlava, Data Harmony - introduces taxonomies and how to create them.

+ Semi-Automated Creation of Faceted Hierarchies Marti Hearst, Berkeley

"Taxonomy Boot Camp 2006 offered nearly 200 enthusiastic attendees the rare chance to focus on taxonomies-all the time-and nothing but taxonomies."

Conference for 2007 is scheduled for November 8-9, 2007 in San Jose, CA.

Earley buys Wordmap

Wordmap Ltd, makers of the the enterprise taxonomy software, has been bought by Earley and Associates, consultants in content management and taxonomies.

See Tantalizing taxonomies, KMWorld (Feb 7, 2007)

Seth Earley, principal of the firm, explained, "An interesting aspect of the Wordmap suite that differentiates it from many products on the market is the integration with content tagging and search. After all is said and done, taxonomies are only useful if they are presented to the user in a meaningful way. Wordmap modules have the ability to do that without a lot of API level coding. The tagging module overcomes many limitations of content management tools in presenting and applying taxonomies for tagging. The navigation module is an easy way to add faceted search (also called guided navigation) without having to acquire additional faceted search tools. In these ways, Wordmap adds value to existing search and content management environments."

Study into Tagging Practices

Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems: An Examination of Tagging Practices by Margaret E.I. Kipp and D. Grant Campbell, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario

Abstract

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.