Enterprise Content Management

KMWorld has released Best Practices for Enterprise Content Management (March 2008) [Register to access the document]

"How do you CONTROL and BENEFIT from content? Start with educating yourself about the many forms and functions of content management tools."

The online publication has articles that look at tools (Sharepoint, InQuira and others) and strategies (handling email overload, search, new formats).

Andy Moore introduces the set with an article "The Chaos of Content">

"Harnessing the power of content is, it seems, easier said than done. Between the
massive volumes that challenge the most well-equipped IT teams and the crazy new
ways that knowledge is transferred that stymie the business managers, content has
become the rose with the thorn. This KMWorld White Paper is a perfect example;
the subjects here range from records management to knowledge transfer and
back again faster than you can turn the pages. But please turn them, and read them,
because if this group is correct (and I think they are) the future of your organizations will depend on it."

Nothing on taxonomies or classification in this set, but the context is important.

Northern Light's MI Analyst

Northern Light Launches MI Analyst 2.0, eContent (Feb 26)

"Northern Light has launched its second major release of MI Analyst, an automated "meaning extraction" application designed specifically for market intelligence, market research, and product research. MI Analyst 2.0 adds many new "facets" (categories of terms) by which the software can analyze search results, automatically extracting meaning from internal and research documents, licensed secondary research, news stories and web sources."

New release adds facets for the pharmaceutical industry - "Human Anatomy, Diseases, Drugs, Cells, Cell Receptors, Proteins, Genes, Enzymes, Pharmaceutical Markets, Life Sciences Scenarios and Research Strategies and Therapeutic Approaches".

Study: Social Tagging in Communities

Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks

Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang gather a series of international perspectives on the practice of social tagging of documents within a community context.

Ariadne, Issue 54 January 2008

From the introduction:

"Social tagging, which is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, and social indexing, allows ordinary users to assign keywords, or tags, to items. Typically these items are Web-based resources and the tags become immediately available for others to see and use. Unlike traditional classification, social tagging keywords are typically freely chosen instead of using a controlled vocabulary. Social tagging is of interest to researchers because it is possible that with a sufficiently large number of tags, useful folksonomies will emerge that can either augment or even replace traditional ontologies. As a result, social tagging has created a renewed level of interest in manual indexing [1]. In order for researchers to understand the benefits and limitations of using user-generated tags for indexing and retrieval purposes, it is important to investigate to what extent community influences tagging behaviour, characteristic effects on tag datasets, and whether this influence helps or hinders search and retrieval.

This article reports on research presented on a panel at The American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) 2007 annual conference which investigated the use of social tagging in communities and in context. The panel was co-sponsored by SIG-TAG, a special interest group of ASIS&T that is interested in the study of social tagging, the Special Interest Group on Knowledge Management (SIG-KM), and the Special Interest Group on Classification Research (SIG-CR)."

...

"Several models of tagging behaviour, aimed at describing the ways in which people tag, are invoked in these studies along with metrics such as the number of tags given, tag co-occurrence and measured frequency. This reflects an ongoing dialogue between researchers; some apply methods from social network analysis, some from the many subfields of linguistics, knowledge management and classification research. Tagging practice is generally from a known stance, such as metadata, keyword or thesaurus provision, a matter of situating the relevance of the concept to known disciplines. Here too, we begin with a familiar theme; writ large, this panel examines certain facets of contextuality in information retrieval."

Taxonomies for Local Business Search

Yellow Pages and Business Directories on the Web have for the most part operated with the taxonomies that were used in print to help users find what they needed. You'll see examples of this at Yahoo Local Canada
(image below) and YellowPages Canada.



Brian Wool at Clickz, where search marketing is much discussed, noted in his article Local Searchers Hunt for Ideas, Not Categories (Feb 14, 2008) that there's a view that "the generation born from roughly 1980 to 1995, no longer think in terms of categories like previous generations." It's the old boomers who grew up with print who want the categories; young people use keywords. He specifically points to Google as an example of service that has dropped categories - "Gone are the days of matching local search queries to categories. In the last few years, Google has dramatically scaled back its utilization of a category schema in its local search results."

Not so quick. Mike Blumenthal writing for Search Engine Land (Feb 22, 2008) asks - Google Maps Categories: Will The Pain End Soon?. Google Maps is Google Local. He determined that Google uses the categories from SuperPages and allows businesses to add their own categories when using Google's Local Business Center. But the end result has been confusing (likely to users) and frustrating to small businesses who were not showing in the same search results as competitors.

Blumenthal learned through conversations with Google that "... Google's general idea about categorization was to not pick a single taxonomy, provider or structure and their goal was to increase confidence by using many data source signals. Their general approach was to create an overarching categorization system that is a natural reflection of the way people think about these types of searches." Google wants a flexible taxonomy that adapts with more user input.

Blumental -- "It is clear that a straight up flat, categorization system will not be sufficient to meet searcher needs in the age of internet expectations. I assume that the transition from this relatively flat structure to the more flexible taxonomy that Google is speaking about is one of the friction points currently causing problems."

And the other question is will it ever work? Might the rejection by the 'millennials' of taxonomies have been because of poor design of the interface? Putting like things together is an age-old practice of facilitating access. If the taxonomy isn't up front, it will at least need to be operating in the background.

Enterprise Search Summit 2008

Taxonomies will really be shown in context at the upcoming Enterprise Search Summit. This will take place May 20-21, 2008 in New York City.

Full program is at http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/

"The emphasis for ENTERPRISE SEARCH SUMMIT 2008 is on “extending search,” as search becomes not just an application but a major computing platform. The agenda focuses on how enterprise search software and related applications really work inside organizations and covers the complex issues and problems that challenge experienced search managers. Expert speakers tackle tough topics such as tuning search to deliver optimum results, making the most of search logs and analytics, applying Web services solutions to metadata challenges, developing topic maps, and much more. Breakout sessions pack more hours of programming into the concentrated conference schedule and give you the chance to select topics of special interest to customize your conference experience."

Look for sessions on:

+ Categorizations: A Case Study by Tom Reamy, KAPS Group
+ Taxonomy-Powered Discovery: Who says you need an expert -- Heather Hedden, Viziant Corp.
+ Search as the Gateway to Enterprise Information - Lou Paglia, Factiva
+ How Faceted Navigation Aids Discovery - Seth Earley and Associates
+ Social Work: Is Social Search Right for the Enterprise - moderated by Jean Graef, The Montague Institute
+ Keynote Panel: Take a 30,000-Foot View of Enterprise Search Implementation - moderated by Sue Feldman, Content Technologies Group, IDC

Peter Morville Speaks About Findability

Peter Morville spoke about findability at the WebStock Conference in New Zealand. Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb reported on the session.

The Future of Search: Peter Morville Defines, Shows Examples by Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb (Feb 13, 2008)

Peter Morville, author the book Ambient Findability, defines it as "the quality of being locatable or navigable". To accomplish this means using metadata, pattern finding, taxonomies and tagging.

"Morville says it's about bringing together things like tags and taxonomies, not keeping them apart. He points to sites like Etsy, where users can classify their items and tag. He says the future of search will be "a future where search and browsing work together". He refers to a Marcia Bates article about "berrypicking"."

A few examples of products and services are mentioned: Endeca for guided navigation, which Morville says "mirrors the way our psychology works when searching for information". Buzzillions, a product review site, uses facets to help people navigate through products.

Videos on Taxonomy Development

Video Library: Dave Clarke on Taxonomy Management Tools by Daniela Barbosa (Feb 3, 2008)

Features three video segments and slides of a presentation by Dave Clarke Director of Global Taxonomy at Dow Jones on the process and software tools for developing a taxonomy. Synaptica, the tool that Dow Jones uses, is well described.

Patrick Lambe, from whose blog these videos first appeared, also has video podcasts of Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies talking about two taxonomy development case studies in the public sector: Singapore metadata standards, and the US Environment Protection Agency.

The sessions were from the iKMS conference held in Singapore in August 2007.

Primer on Taxonomies

Better Living Through Taxonomies by Heather Hedden, Digital Life Magazine (Feb 5, 2008)

Heather Hedden tackles the matter of improving navigation at a web site through the use of a well planned taxonomy. This article is an excellent primer to the design and use of taxonomies - what they look like, how to create them, and how they benefit the searcher. Concludes with a list of resources.

"Large websites and intranets can benefit from improved methods of search and navigation. These include site maps, A-Z indexes, sophisticated search engines, and generally improved navigational design—and playing a potential role in all of these methods is well-planned taxonomy."

Thanks to Patrick Lambe of Organising Knowledge for this lead.

Negative for taxonomies

Enterprise Search: Leveraging and Learning From Web Search and Content Tools Lynda Moulton, Gilbane Enterprise Search Practice(Dec 14 2007)

Lynda Moulton asked panelists at the Gilbane Boston 2007 Conference, "Will Web and Internet Search Technologies Drive the Enterprise (Internal) Search Tool Offerings or Will the Markets Diverge?" She noted their comments in this blog entry.

Of interest: "Among the other noteworthy comments in this session was a negative about taxonomies. The gist of it was that they require so much discipline that they might work for a while but can’t really be sustained. If this attitude becomes the norm, many of the semantic search engines which depend on some type of classification and categorization according to industry terminologies or locally maintained lists will be challenged to deliver enhanced search results. ..."

Microsoft Sharepoint and Enterprise Search

Jean Graef of the Montague Institute provides an analysis of Microsoft's Sharepoint for enterprise search in a paper available from the Enterprise Search Center. Main points are summarized in the e-newsletter of February 6, 2008

Whether you deploy MOSS for enterprise search depends on your technology strategy and budget, how much you’ve invested in metadata and taxonomies, and how you plan to search multiple content repositories. If you use SharePoint for collaboration and content management but choose another product for enterprise search, you’ll need to consider two kinds of complimentary products: taxonomy management programs that integrate with MOSS search, and search engines that can search SharePoint content.

Analysis looks at metadata discovery capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) search and use of thesaurus data and relationships to expand a search. These capabilities, however, are limited.

So while it’s possible to tweak MOSS search results using a variety of techniques along with some data from an existing thesaurus, it’s a labor-intensive endeavor. For this reason, some organizations with large, complex taxonomies opt to purchase third-party thesaurus management software that integrates with SharePoint—an approach that Microsoft endorses. Examples of MOSS-compatible taxonomy management tools include Factiva Synaptica,Data Harmony Machine-Aided Indexer, Schemalogic
SchemaServer, and Interse I-box.

The full report, Sharepoint Search - an Enterprise Contender?, is available for free with registration. [PDF - 6 pages]