Webinar on Folksonomies and Taxonomies

Webinar: Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise

Daniela Barbosa of Dow Jones Client Solutions will be leading a Webinar organized by the Dow Jones InfoPro Alliance about Folksonomies & Taxonomies in the Enterprise on January 10, 2008. Registration is free. (Link is in that posting)

Among the topics:

* Business value of a taxonomy/folksonomy
* Impact of social networking tools on the enterprise
* Governance tools
* Merging folksonomies and existing taxonomies
* Some best practices and common obstacles

This entry comes from her weblog - daniela barbosa chitchatting about information delivery.

Postscript Feb 15, 2008 - webcast for this session is available from Factiva InfoPro probably until mid 2008. Uses Event On24.

Demonstrating Value of a Taxonomy

Demonstrating taxonomy value to senior managers - Montague Institute will be holding a teleconference primer/roundtable discussion on February 20, 2008 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm Eastern time.

"In this primer/roundtable, Montague Institute founder Jean Graef will show how concepts from IT, library science, and corporate publishing can be used to communicate taxonomy benefits to different stakeholder groups. She will also summarize the experiences of Society members in selling taxonomy to their management."

Full description, price, and registration at http://www.montague.com/roundtable43.html

Exalead Enterprise 4.6

Exalead Announces Updated Version of exalead one:enterprise, EContent (Dec 7, 2007)

Exalead, notable for its search product that can extract related terms, has released exalead one:enterprise 4.6 with "several new enhancements that are designed to help organizations easily configure and customize business applications, including hybrid vertical search applications."

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.

Taxonomies & the Semantic Web - Call Session

Taxonomies & the Semantic Web from the Taxonomies Communities of Practice - a teleconference by Earley and Associates - October 31, 2007, 1 - 2 pm EST. 50$ US (Slides are sent in advance.)

"Taxonomy is the art of adding value to information by placing it in a useful order that supports both direct searching and serendipitous browsing. Taxidermy is the art of stuffing and arranging the skins of dead animals to create lifelike effects. Taxonomies are a fundamental part of the Semantic Web: machine-readable hierarchies that enable intelligent agents to make logical inferences, thereby making information retrieval an entirely new, more sophisticated experience. However, recent books such as Dave Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous and Eric Abrahamson's A Perfect Mess suggest that taxonomy and taxidermy are closer than we care to acknowledge."

Montague Institute on Sharepoint

Montague Institute is taking a closer look at Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services (MOSS 2007) with a round-table teleconference, a new discussion list, and a web course.

> Yahoo discussion list for Sharepoint search.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sharepointsearch

"This topic includes all issues relating to creating, organizing, and finding documents on the Sharepoint platform. The group is intended as a forum for people who manage records, documents, intranet content, and external collaboration sites as well as for indexers, corporate taxonomists, and enterprise search managers."

> Web course Taxonomies, Search & Sharepoint -($$$)

Semantic Web Blend

A Smarter Web - New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0." By John Borland, MIT Technology Review (March 2007)

The Semantic Web - the structure that will enable us to see connections between databases and gather information with less effort - is getting closer. This article describes the objectives, the progress, the players in making smarter tools for organizing and finding information. Ontologies are involved as are user-generated tagsonomies.

"The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent "Web 3.0.""

The writer traces the history to organize information from Melvil Dewey's days, through the early days of directories on the Web, and the increasing acceptance of using metadata to describe information objects.

Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, has been one of the contributors to furthering "semantic web" enabling technologies.

Meanwhile, social tagging has been gaining acceptance imposing a "grassroots order" on collections.

"No one knows what organizational technique will ultimately prevail. But what's increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world's digital data in a single framework."