Faceted Approach for Information Management

Designing the Samurai sword: using facets to support agile, highly-effective information management By Jennifer Smith, FUMSI (June 1, 2011)

Jennifer Smith writes persuasively on the ease of using a faceted design for retrieving information. She works for ONEIS, a UK company that desogms and supports information management systems.

She makes the faceted approach sound easy - "When deploying a faceted system, you need to map out what information you have, who needs to access it and how they would want to find it. You then create the structure for representing that information using Types and Attributes."

Toolbox for IT has the answers

Toolbox for IT is a rich resource of information about all things related to information management - the complete gamut of knowledge management, records management, cloud, enterprise applications, enterprise architecture and much more. Taxonomy and ontology are covered too under knowledge management. This is a community-based site with blogs and wikis where participants contribute content and discuss issue. Good resource for getting definitions and descriptions, and for asking questions and participating.

Managing information through classification

Get Your Data Under Control with Automated Content Categorization (PDF), AIIM, (May 2011)

White paper from Recommind. Classification is still the method for managing data but manual can't handle the high volumes and automated has errors. Recommind claims to have a solution.

"Today CIOs have choices beyond the manual and automated approaches, such as Recommind Decisiv™ Categorization. As part of Recommind’s suite of data management tools, Decisiv Categorization offers automated classification through supervised learning.
The technology effectively leverages the knowledge of human beings to teach technology to better automate classification." -

Webinar on Msater Data Management

Taxonomy & Master Data Management - free webinar from Earley and Associations - June 23, 2011

"The approaches discussed are key to harmonizing disparate sources of data with a master data management architecture. We also provide insights into tool capabilities needed to support complex data mapping by overviewing capabilities of Oracle's PDQ (Product Data Quality) suite."

Tool to build faceted navigation

VisualDataWeb Announces the Release of tFacet, SemanticWeb.com (May 15)

People developing a faceted view of data may find tFacet from VisualDataWeb helpful.

"... a new tool that applies known interaction concepts to allow hierarchical-faceted exploration of RDF data.” According to the description, “The aim is to facilitate ordinary users to formulate semantically unambiguous queries so as to support the fast and precise access to information. Used interaction concepts are e.g. a directory tree and interchangeable columns that are already well-known from other applications. The directory tree, for example, is used to enable the intuitive exploration and selection of hierarchical facets. "

Website has a short screencast and a demo.

eTaxonomy and Social Media in Marketing

Sentiment Analysis and Taxonomy, Seth Earley

Sentiment analysis means monitoring social media for tone of comments - a new "content ecosystem", as Seth Earley notes on his slide presentation. He shows the use and need of an etaxonomy to map the relationships about terms, and provide context. There are many segments to manage: competitors, audience, target markets, channels ...

Second part of slide show is about the impact of social media on marketing, with useful review of challenges of marketing classification, and the application of eTaxonomy facets to marketing practice.

Upcoming Webinars at Earley and Associates

Earley & Associates has three webinars scheduled for April to May on various aspects and technologies for information management.

+ Sharepoint Case Study with Ford Foundation
+ From Supplier to Consumer - Optimizing the Information Supply Chain in the Retail Industry
+ Taxonomy & Metadata Management in Healthcare

Quoting from the email:

"We are pleased to have three very different events coming up. First up, this Wednesday, is a nuts and bolts discussion about developing a content strategy and IA in SharePoint. Our guest is Nicki Lodico, an Information Management Manager at the Ford Foundation. If you want the inside story on a real life, successful, SharePoint implementation you won't want to miss this session.

At the end of the month some of our top consultants will be discussing how a few leading retailers have been pushing the envelope using taxonomy and metadata to improve efficiency and increase sales. If any part of your business is ecommerce, you will want to join us for this session.

Looking ahead to May, we have Dr. Christian Reich joining us to talk about his experience with inter-relating data coded with disparate vocabularies and classification systems in healthcare systems. Dr. Reich's work is fascinating and you'll want to put this on your calendar no matter what business you are in. "

Details at http://www.earley.com/webinars/upcoming

Winning Intranet Designs

A study on Intranets design and use by Jakob Nielson showed that Intranets do further knowledge management, and that some companies designed interfaces for mobile phones.

10 Best Intranets of 2011 (Jan 4, 2011)

A Canadian law firm got onto the list -Bennett Jones LLP (Canada)=. Verizon and Credit Suisse are on the list for the second time.

+ 60% of winners had a mobile version - they focused on features of greatest importance to their uses.
+ all winners did "knowledge management" well that included six "solutions": knowledge sharing, innovation management (or innovation support), comments from readers, rating systems - involves users and improves rankings, rewards for participation, and employees could customize collections. Many of these are enterprise 2.0 type of features. Intranets include blogs and video sharing and many features to encourage sharing.

Several trends are listed. Of interest - "Better-structured intranets based on task-centered IAs, often breaking up a legacy of information silos", and "Emphasis on search and on initiatives to improve search quality (which continues to suffer on many intranets). "

The 433 page report (which costs $248 ) has 218 screenshots of the winning designs.

Earley Jumpstart Series on Sharepoint

Earley and Associates has a new 4-part jumpstart series starting on Sharepoint 2011 - looking at "best practices for taking information organization and access to new levels, producing much greater value to businesses."

SharePoint 2010 - Architecting for Business Value, Earley and Associates

Topics:

* SharePoint 2010 - Best Practices for Creating Business Value (March 3)
* Methods and Tools for Better SharePoint Search (March 10)
* Practical Approaches to Developing Rich Information Architectures (March 17)
* The Role of Governance in Ensuring Success (March 24)

Free with registration - can't beat that.

SEO Audit, Site Architecture, Taxonomies

Taxonomies are important in website architecture for navigation (as we know) and in search engine optimization.

How To Do An SEO Audit by Michael Martinez, SEO Case Studies,SEO Metrics (March 7, 2011)

In this article about the reasons for conducting an SEO audit on a website and the steps to do so.

Site architecture is arguably one of the most important parts - along with keyword analysis.

"Toponymy defines how things are named. Taxonomy defines how things are organized. Toponymy tells you what keywords are used in the URL and page names. Taxonomy tells you how the folders and sub-domains are sorted and arranged in the site’s hierarchy. Navigation tells you which pages and sections are most important to any page."

Overall, article will be of some interest to the information professional in considering taxonomies, keywords, and content.