Building an ECM Taxonomy

Forrester has published a guide to creating taxonomies -- How To Build A High-Octane Taxonomy For ECM And Enterprise Search Systems (Nov 17, 2008). Forrester makes the point that "... it's vital to enrich the content that flows through these systems with more meaningful and structured metadata. Enriched content is simply easier to isolate, promote, find, and control." Table of contents is provided in the document excerpt.

Cost is $379 US but there is a promise of full refund in the first 3 weeks if you aren't satisfied.

Social Tagging

Many have examined the value of user tagging and compared it to the use of controlled vocabulary.

These are the topics in "The Value of Social Tagging in a Corporate Setting" (April 2006) by Stephanie Lemieux in the TaxoCop wiki. It includes a description of the use of social tagging at Raytheon where "people submit website suggestions (URLs) along with recommended tags/keyword which are subsequently verified and approved by librarians."

"Why does it work? Chiefly because the sites submitted are specific to a group or discipline, and no matter how hard we try, having a degree in library science does not give you a degree in engineering (insert discipline here). We do not speak their vernacular. We do well enough to add value with controlled terms, but these folk tags have a life of their own."

The 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems had two papers on social tagging available through the ACM Portal:

• Social tagging roles: publishers, evangelists, leaders
• What drives content tagging: the case of photos on Flickr

Abstract and references are available. Access requires subscription to ACM.

Social Tagging at Museums

There are some interesting postings about tagging and folksonomies at conference.archimuse.com site hosted by Archives and Museums Informatics.

The site is described as "a collaborative space for professionals creating culture, science and heritage on-line"

J Trant posts entries to the archimuse blog about tagging. One refers to her presentation on Access to Art Museums Online: A role for social tagging and folksonomy?. Findings come from STEVE:The Museum Social Tagging Project.

Considerations for Enterprise Search

Why enterprise search is not internet search by Mary Branscombe, IT Pro (Dec 4, 2008)

Google has proven to be terrific on the Web, but will it do as well searching resources in an organization? Google uses link analysis in relevancy ranking which doesn't work as well inside an organization where there are no links between documents and files. An enterprise search tool needs to do more - as this article points out - working in large part with metadata. Several companies are mentioned - Recommind, Autonomy, Microsoft and InQuira - and Google's Search Appliance is also described.

The enterprise search engine must also "integrate with document repositories, corporate databases, ERP and CRM systems, email, call centre and customer support systems, directories like LDAP and Active Directory, your HR and accounting systems and everywhere else".

There are some figures in this article on the costs of looking for information - "businesses waste the equivalent of 10 per cent of salary costs (says the Butler Group) or information workers waste around three to four hours a week – a total of five weeks a year - because they don’t find the information they’re looking for a third to a half of the time (IDC and HP)."

Explaining Taxonomies

Waffles and Taxonomies by Rich Payne, AIIM Infonomics Magazine

Rich Payne orients readers to the concepts of taxonomy through an analogy with food orders at a Waffle House. The example works - somewhat.

I'm not sure he made the point about eggs completely clear. Let's imagine the Waffle House needs to sales records and other information about the product line. It would see that different kinds of eggs are big business for them. To help people find the information about eggs, they might set up a "taxonomy" for eggs with sub-types of scrambled, fried, poached, boiled. This resembles a thesaurus, where the scrambled, boiled etc are the Narrow Terms.

Two basic rules are interesting:

• Users must understand the "product of taxonomy"
• Almost everything has a relationship or is part of a hierarchy

Controlled Vocabulary in Folksonomies

Editorial - Folksonomies: Why do we need controlled vocabulary? by Alireza Noruzi , Webology (June 2007)

Answers the question "what can a thesaurus do for a folksonomy-based system?" Also makes clear how the folksonomy differs from a classification system.

"Folksonomy is a bottom-up approach where users themselves join the classification, compared to top-down taxonomy and library classifications. By this nature, folksonomy classification can reflect users' actual interest in real time (Niwa et al., 2006). In contrast to hierarchical library classifications (e.g., DDC or LCC) and thesauri, there is usually no limit for choice of tags in folksonomy; so many similar tags are generated. "

Taxonomies and ECM

Paul Quigley, Editorial Director at Enterprise Content Management 365, makes some interesting comments about enterprise taxonomy and folksonomies in the wake of Google's Index Now site search application.

"In the week that SEO behemoth Google took the wraps off its new indexing for content application 'Index Now' site search, the whole sphere of enterprise taxonomy and folksonomies is conjured as the role of knowledge management and context become ever more critical to effective content management strategies. ... The world of semantics, ontology and Kantian epistemology comes to mind in the vast 'contextualisation' process of content management, a veritable holy grail for all umbrella content in a massed digital asset world."

Off-the-shelf taxonomy will not work, but it is suggested that business process management can help in creating a classification / organizing scheme.

These are comments from the November 28th, 2008 newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter to get updates and ECM industry news.

Clustify documents

Automatic categorization, EContent (Nov 6)

"Hot Neuron has released Version 2.0 of its Clustify document clustering software, which automatic document categorization and other tools to help corporations and law firms explore and organize large document sets."

Clustify will do auto-categorization

Automatic Categorization Added in Hot Neuron’s Clustify 2.0, Newsbreaks (Nov 6)

"Hot Neuron, LLC announced the release of version 2.0 of its Clustify document clustering software, which features automatic document categorization and other tools to help corporations and law firms explore and organize large document sets. Clustify groups related documents into clusters, allowing the user to explore the document set and efficiently and consistently categorize documents by categorizing entire clusters of documents with a single mouse click."

For more information on Clustify, visit www.cluster-text.com.

Creating a Taxonomy

Creating User-Centred Taxonomies: Part Two by James Kelway, FUMSI (Sept 2008)

In Part 2, James Kelway show how to create, test, and launch the taxonmomy.