On Organizing Content with Tags

Thom Johnson at I'd Rather be Writing has been writing a series of posts on findability - or more precisely - organizing content. There are 50 entries since 2010. It's eclectic - simulation, navigation, faceted - and much more. One one Using Tags to Increase Findability explores the value of tags as metadata. He draws from a book by Gene Smith - Tagging, People Powered Metadata for the Social Web.

Digital Workplace

This post in the VIP LiveWire forum - Can search replace "the perfect secretary"? - alerts us to a growing problem in organizations - that of making decisions based on data. It leads to two major studies: a survey on unstructured data, and one on the digital workplace.

The Swiss-based Infocentric Research published The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age. Its director of research, Stephan Schillerwein, observed that "Searching can take up to two hours of each working day".

Solutions are needed. The Infocentric Research whitepaper on the digital workplace and information management might help.

Introduction to classification

A Brief History of Classification by Christine Connors, TriviumRLG LLC (Jan 10)

Humans have been classifying for as long as they have used a written language. One of the earliest examples is Pinakes at the Library of Alexandra. This short history takes us up to Ranganathan's Colon Classification in the 1900s, and observes that the first enterprise use was by publishers of indexes. On the web we have seen the classification structures of the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory Project. Today, "Pattern matching is the basis for much of what occurs in these systems for rules based categorization."

Improving enterprise search

Huge problems for search in the enterprise Pandia, Dec 18, 2011

Enterprise search is not web search. It involves searching across disparate database. This article has some data on how bad search is - "some employees spend up to two hours per day searching for information in intranets and enterprise search tools"

The findings and discussion come from a report from The Digital Workplace by Stephan Schillerwein available from Infocentric Research.

"According to Schillerwein, one of the main reasons for the problems of enterprise search is the lack of context. In days of old, information in the enterprise was found by secretaries — real persons, not computerized assistants — who knew who you were, what your job was and what you were currently working. A search engine has none of this context. "

Schillerwein takes a very personal approach - what the employees does, needs, and prefers. There is no mention of an enterprise taxonomy

Landscape of Enterprise Search - book

A short introduction to enterprise search, Pandia (Dec 10)

Short presentation with highlights from Stephen Arnold's book, The Landscape of Enterprise Search. You can buy the book for a mere 20 USD.

More about finding the right solution at Pandia Enterprise Search.

Introduction to taxonomies and thesauri

LLRX has picked up Gail Rayburn's presentation on Taxonomies and Thesauri to the Washington DC SLA chapter. (Nov 1, 2011). It's a very good primer to the terms and structure, and a guide to how to go about building one. Includes a brief introduction to ontologies as well.

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2011 Presentations

Presentations from Taxonomy Boot Camp, Oct 31 to Nov 1,2011, are available at http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2011/presentations.aspxhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

New Directions by Don Turnbull takes us on a tour of organizing data and information emotively (by mood), for the individual - the personal taxonomy, behavioral patterns, judgement - ratings and permissions, and lastly, the one we know a bit more about, semantics and clustering.

Very interesting example of working with taxonomies in the presentation on Rebuilding Taxonomy Warehouse as an Ontology from Dave Clarke at Synaptica International.

Gary Carlson has good advice and amusing examples in Avoiding the Autobiographical Taxonomy

Other well known presenters include Heather Hedden, Patrick Lambe, Seth Earley, Tom Reamy.

Taxonomy Management Tools

New Advisory Paper: Taxonomy Management Tools, Angela Guess, Semantic Web (Nov 17)

Costs money but could be useful -- "New Taxonomy Management Advisory Paper from The Real Story Group(PRWEB) November 15, 2011

The Real Story Group just released a new Advisory Paper: "Taxonomy Management Tools: A Comparative Evaluation." Taxonomy management tools have become a key player in end-to-end architectures for tackling content organization challenges, but the tools vary substantially in approach, and the marketplace as a whole remains somewhat immature, according to The Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates web and enterprise technologies."

Taxonomy and Metadata Uppermost

Taxonomy and Metadata and Findability Influence Traditional Roles, Theresa Putkey, KeyPoint Usability Consulting (Oct 17)

A view from the trenches perhaps --

"As an information architect, I work with companies who are struggling with information organization. They recognize the need to put their information into a content management system (CMS) to ensure digital information or digital surrogates for physical objects can be found. As a consultant, companies hire me to help build metadata and taxonomy structures."

US National Agricultural Library Agricultural Thesaurus

http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, Press release from USDA (Oct 11, 2011)

The Agricultural Thesaurus from the National Agricultural Library (US) is fully available online.

" It provides standard terms in both English and Spanish that can be used for indexing to improve the retrieval of information."http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif