Taxonomy Boot Camp 2007

The advance program from Taxonomy Boot Camp to take place in November 8-9, 2007 is now available. This is done in conjunction with KMWorld & Intranets and Enterprise Search Summit.

Cogito semantic intelligence

Expert System is an Italian firm specializing in semantic intelligent software for document management. It has just released Cogito SIMS, a semantic intelligent management system with capabilities for auto-classification. "Cogito is said to streamline the development of applications to understand, discover and classify information contained in unstructured text, as well as to review, normalize and automatically enhance metadata--through the extraction of named entities, relations and event-related data trapped in text." [Semantic intelligence management, Enterprise Search Center, May 16, 2007].

Book and Blog about Organizing Knowledge

People working with knowledge management, taxonomies, and folksonomies will be interested in Patrick Lambe's new book (February 2007) Organising Knowledge. Some excerpts and comments are provided on Lambe's page about the book.

He explained, "Hence, as far as I know, this is also the first taxonomy book that combines a practical guide to taxonomy development with a broader explanation of how taxonomy work contributes to knowledge management in a variety of ways."

His weblog, Green Chameleon, has several categories related to knowledge management and to taxonomy which provide various insights. This one on Folksonomies and Rich Serendipity argues for the value of people as "knowledge aggregators". This is a very thoughtful piece that was later included in Lambe's book.

Patrick Lambe is a principal with Straits Knowledge, a consulting firm for information and knowledge management based in Singapore.

Enterprise Search

Best Practices in Enterprise Search, Vol III [May 2007] from KMWorld - state of enterprise search today. Has articles on relational navigation, semantic search, metadata, search 2.0, evolution of enterprise search, e-discovery compliance, and much more. Features the technologies of the leading enterprise search vendors.

Siderean's Relational Navigation

Raising the bar on relational navigation, KMWorld (May 17, 2007)

Siderean's Seamark Navigator 4.5 enables identification of the relationships between sets of data across disparate sources whether structured or unstructured. Among other benefits, it may make it easier for users to create and manage taxonomies, but also to be able to see connections between facets - to be able to "branch out".

"The offering takes full advantage of semantic technology to enable users to harness content from across the enterprise and on the Web, greatly facilitating information access and discovery. Further, says Siderean, it enables more user participation than before, providing new tagging, voting, ranking and reviewing capabilities. It also helps knowledge workers to efficiently collaborate via commenting features and the ability to save and share searches."

Paula Hane at Information Today's Newsbreaks provides a longer description in Siderean Upgrades Its Relational Navigation Platform (May 14) Sue Feldman of IDC was among those interviewed for this article. She said that "Siderean handles dynamism — elements don’t have to be predetermined. And, while other discovery tools allow drill down through facets and hierarchies, Siderean can handle ‘sideways relationships’ in a unique way."

Siderean Software website has whitepapers and articles on its relational navigation. Especially recommended is the short video (3 minutes) on the Evolution of Search in which the VP of software engineering, Jack Berkowitz, compares keyword search, faceted search, and relational search.

David Weinberger in his blog, Everything Is Miscellaneous, references the Siderean patent for relational navigation, saying "Faceted classification and taxonomies both work by showing the user narrower and narrower results. That's often what we want, but in this crazy world, we may also want to leap off the branch we've walked onto." Siderean's relational navigation might be the method.

Endeca Finds Relationships

Endeca Tackles Complex Interrelationships in New IAP Version by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 30, 2007)

Endeca Technologies (www.endeca.com) is best known for Guided Navigation, a faceted view for discovering content at a website. This article describes improvements that make possible "new data-driven approach with metarelational indexing that lets users navigate complex relationships between different types of information from different sources".

From the article - "Here’s a simplified description of how Endeca’s architecture works. Each document or record is a set of facets. Some facets are explicit, such as database fields or file metadata. In addition, the text itself can be transformed into explicit facets through entity and term extraction, classification, and other techniques. Finally, what the document is “about” from the user’s perspective is implicit, so Endeca keeps a full-text index of the document as another facet. Working with facets allows Endeca to adapt to disparate information types, to make connections and correlations, and to show the content interrelationships to users."

Article includes screenshots and links to a demo.

Evaluating Classification

Taxonomy is classification. This article may help in developing and validating a classification scheme in the early stages.

Measuring the Success Of a Classification System by Iain Barker, Boxes and Arrows (April 2007)

Barker adapted work by Donna Maurer for evaluating card-based classification and applied it to quantitatively showing the improvements to be obtained from a new classification system for the company intranet.

Tagging made easier

User tagging of company documents and Web materials may just have got easier with TagEasy from TagSearch Technologies. Social search tools are gradually being adopted by companies.

Tagsearch Technologies Launches Tagging and Web Collaboration Platform, EContent (Apr 24)

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".