xreferplus-dereksturdy

Derek Sturdy

Tikit Granite & Comfrey

Non-legal content integration – issues, methods, benefits

Our founders

Sir William Granite1738 - 1813

Rev. Dr. Nicholas Comfrey1742 - 1818


Their first employee


Miss Emma Hardfarthing, c. 1801

KM in perspective

matterdocuments

know-how

external resourcesinternal

(including primary law, government,online commentary, non-legal content,

"trade" sites, CDs, etc)

marketing,project

documents


Outline

• Who needs to link to non-legal content?

• Linking via taxonomies– implications for internal taxonomies

– taxonomy to taxonomy

– taxonomy to full text

• Linking by straight search


Who are the users?

• Not primarily researchers because they know how to set about it anyway

• Non-legal content linking is mainly for– lawyers at their desks– marketing people– services staff eg IT, secretaries


What do our users have in common?

• They want a complex issue made simple, which is impossible– all that silly stuff about "integration"

and "just give me a simple box" which results in 75,000 hits or nothing

• They will gratefully accept handsomely presented guidance


What's wrong with Google?

• Nothing at all, except that– your users do not know what is verified

and what is rubbish

– even the "advanced" search is just one of those oh-so-nineties field things

– 50 pages * 20 hits at legal costs = ruin

– basically, far too much information because of all the junk on the web


What does this actually mean?

• That all successful attempts to integrate valuable content are trying their own methods of getting round the structured – unstructured issue

• Is there a one size fits all answer? No, there isn't. Let's look at that ...


The internal only answer

• Relational databases (ie organised metadata)– handle precision recall – handle the updating issues– handle lateral linking– but sadly ....

• Outside your control is all the other external stuff which is still unstructured "content" – ie straight text – low value, but lots of it!

• This is a temporary phase, but it will see most of us out .....


Ways to approach this

• Autonomy – designed for science, brilliant at science, rubbish for law

• Metadata – which means the taxonomy stuff in terms of added value – designed for soft subjects like law and social science

• Hybrid systems – like xrefer – which use ingenious software to try and cut down the costs of the metadata approach


Why not purely automatic software?

• Because of the tiny legal vocabulary – 5000 terms, instead of 250,000 – with meaning dependent on context

• Because of the citation problem – not to be discussed in detail today

• In essence: automatic software needs one word to have one meaning, which is true in science (normally) and often not true of law (except at the highest level)


What must a taxonomy deliver?

• Real help in finding things• Therefore - no ambiguity!• Comfort for users of collections

– have I got everything relevant? - comprehensiveness– have I avoided irrelevance? - accuracy– can I easily find similar stuff? – lateral linking

• Is it still true?– if the firm knows anything about anything on which

practice is based, do I know it too?


Components: taxonomies

• Thesauri– legal subject, legal work type– geog./jurisdiction, industry/sector, assets

• Authority files built up for – cases– legislation– own know-how documents– grey paper


The Three C’s

• Classification – subject matter

• Categorisation – types of work

• Citation – reference to other documents, but especially to legal authorities

• Cases• Legislation


Where might these be applied?

general www resources

paid-for online resources

primary law resources

document management

practice management

know-how management

The Firm External Resources


example: Search Engine Applications




document management

practice management

know-how management


Classification - subject thesauri



document management

practice management

know-how management



Categorisation – type of work



paid-for online resourcespractice management

document management

know-how management


Authority Files – exact Citations




document management

practice management

know-how management


Matter documents

Know How

Matter metadata

KH m’data

Metadata density and classification workloads

Relatively simple, high volume

Millions of documents

Specialist, complex,

low volume

External Sources

Specialist know-how


Conclusions so far

• Only certain materials within the firm – know-how - will have detailed classification, categorisation and citation work done on them

• Most other materials in the firm will be classified at a high level only, or be classified by inheritance (eg documents within a matter file)


Direct taxonomy-taxonomy linking

• For the users - seriously cool and dead easy

• For IS staff - match terms not by their letters and spaces but by a one-off human reconciliation of meanings and context – ie some work

• Illustration: PLC


Hybrid methodologies

• Use the taxonomy to guide the inexperienced user's thoughts to the topic concerned

• Drill-down and drill-up techniques are both useful– drill down: start with the general, go to the

particular– drill up: choose a particular term, see if it

exists, see the context and alternative terms


Transfer the idea

• You then use this approach, developed for your own internal resources – intranets, knowledge systems, DMS – to link out to external resources

• Illustration using xrefer here ....


Implications for your taxonomies

• Ambiguity remains the big enemy!• Other enemies:

– "gosh aren't I clever" terms– jobs for the boys/girls – which usually result

in loss of jobs for the ......

• Pointless complexity is the source of most ambiguity – simplify!– segmented taxonomies are the neat way to

simplify


Ambiguity - continued

• If your taxonomies are not simple enough to avoid ambiguity, you should not be meddling with the idea at all

• Complex taxonomies are for academics with time and a clear need for lateral thinking to the n'th degree

• In legal and governmental practice, your users (as defined) may have the brain, but not the time, or may not have the brain


Ambiguity - continued

• Most ambiguity comes from a failure to grasp the point behind the metadata approach, which is "make it easy to find"

• Classification and categorisation are simply tools, not ends in themselves

• Ambiguity is what search engines do!


Direct search

• The user sees a word or phrase ...– and does not understand it– and wants to know more about it

• In the ideal world, she highlights it, clicks it, and gets seven, organised results

• In the real world, this does not happen ... but


Reference linking, concept blow-ups

• The jury is out on this at present

• If you do not know your topic, then you can be misled very easily

• If you have a smattering of knowledge, you can probably navigate successfully

• A little knowledge is much less dangerous than none, despite the proverb to the opposite effect!


Where does this leave us?

• Correct choice of provider• This remains the only way at present to

handle the "integration" and "unstructured data" problem

• pure software doesn't do it – for us• "integrators" are fine for bulletins, but

often useless for research and briefings• therefore the human element has to be

introduced at some point or another


Where is the point of human input?

• the metadata approach: after content has been published, the key content is indexed and abstracted

• the source selection approach: from certain sources, the content is of sufficient quality that it does not need weeding – it's already abstracted, in other words

• two sides of the same coin?


Conclusions

• If you develop a single, large, unsegmented taxonomy, you will be stuck with search-engine approaches to external non-legal content

• If you think beyond legal, to office (ie admin), industries / sectors (ie marketing), and so on, you can develop hybrid approaches

• These will be more powerful than just search engines, though you need those too for esoterica

• The key to this remains: choose your external content providers – give them the problem!



Business

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