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Taxonomy and Knowledge Organization
Taxonomy in ContextTom Reamy
Chief Knowledge Architect
KAPS Group
Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
http://www.kapsgroup.com
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Agenda
Introduction: Time for Taxonomies Business Case for Taxonomies Taxonomy in the Organization: Intellectual Infrastructure
– Content, People, Technology, Activities
Infrastructure Approach to Taxonomy– Staffing and Activities– Taxonomy Development
Conclusion– Future Directions– Building on the Intellectual Infrastructure
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KAPS Group
Knowledge Architecture Professional Services (KAPS) Consulting, strategy recommendations Knowledge architecture audits Partners – Convera, Inxight, FAST, and others Taxonomies: Enterprise, Marketing, Insurance, etc.
– Taxonomy customization Intellectual infrastructure for organizations
– Knowledge organization, technology, people and processes– Search, content management, portals, collaboration,
knowledge management, e-learning, etc.
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Time for Taxonomies
Taxonomy Time: Technology is not delivering– Professionals spend more time looking for information than
using it– 50% of them spend > 2 hours a day looking
Search not enough – text strings vs. concepts– Relevance isn’t very relevant
Data mining misses 80% of significant content– Text mining needs more structure (taxonomies)
70% of all ECM initiatives will fail due to an underinvestmant in taxonomy – Gartner.
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Time for Taxonomies: Word of Caution
Taxonomy is not the answer– Is this a taxonomy?
• Inventories, catalogs, classifications, categorization schemas, thesauri, controlled vocabularies
– Taxonomy not enough – need other structures• Metadata, facets
– Taxonomies have to be used to be useful How to fail:
– Taxonomy as a project– Taxonomy as a search engine project afterthought
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Business Case for Taxonomies:The Right Context Traditional Metrics
– Time Savings – 22 minutes per user per day = $1Mil a Year– Apply to your organization – customer service, content
creation, knowledge industry– Cost of not-finding = re-creating content
Research– Advantages of Browsing – Marti Hearst, Chen and Dumais– Nielsen – “Poor classification costs a 10,000 user
organization $10M each year – about $1,000 per employee.” Stories
– Pain points, success and failure – in your corporate language
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Business Case for Taxonomies:IDC White Paper Information Tasks
– Email – 14.5 hours a week– Create documents – 13.3 hours a week– Search – 9.5 hours a week– Gather information for documents – 8.3 hours a week– Find and organize documents – 6.8 hours a week
Gartner: “Business spend an estimated $750 Billion annually seeking information necessary to do their job. 30-40% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent managing documents.”
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Business Case for Taxonomies:IDC White Paper Time Wasted
– Reformat information - $5.7 million per 1,000 per year (400M)– Not finding information - $5.3 million per 1,000 (370M)– Recreating content - $4.5 Million per 1,000 (315M)
Small Percent Gain = large savings– 1% - $10 million– 5% - $50 million– 10% - $100 million
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Business Case for Taxonomies:The Right Context Justification
– Search Engine - $500K-$2Mil– Content Management - $500K-$2Mil– Portal - $500-$2Mil– Plus maintenance and employee costs
Taxonomy– Small comparative cost– Needed to get full value from all the above
ROI – asking the wrong question– What is ROI for having an HR department?– What is ROI for organizing your company?
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Business Case for Taxonomies:The Right Context – Infrastructure Approach Integrated Enterprise requires both an infrastructure team and
distributed expertise.– Software and SME’s is not the answer - keywords
Taxonomies not stand alone– Metadata, controlled vocabularies, synonyms, etc.– Variety of taxonomies, plus categorization, classification, etc.
• Important to know the differences, when to use which
Advanced Cognitive Differences– Panda, monkey, banana
Infrastructure as Operating System– Word vs. Word Perfect– Instead of sharing clipboard, share information and knowledge.
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Infrastructure Model of Taxonomy DevelopmentTaxonomy in Basic 4 Contexts Ideas – Content Structure
– Language and Mind of your organization– Applications - exchange meaning, not data
People – Company Structure– Communities, Users, Central Team
Activities – Business processes and procedures– Central team - establish standards, facilitate
Technology / Things– CMS, Search, portals, taxonomy tools– Applications – BI, CI, Text Mining
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Taxonomy in ContextStructuring Content All kinds of content and Content Structures
– Structured and unstructured, Internet and desktop
Metadata standards – Dublin core+– Keywords - poor performance – Need controlled vocabulary, taxonomies, semantic network
Other Metadata – Document Type
• Form, policy, how-to, etc.– Audience
• Role, function, expertise, information behaviors– Best bets metadata
Facets – entities and ideas– Wine.com
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Taxonomy in Context:Structuring People
Individual People– Tacit knowledge, information behaviors– Advanced personalization – category priority
• Sales – forms ---- New Account Form• Accountant ---- New Accounts ---- Forms
Communities– Variety of types – map of formal and informal– Variety of subject matter – vaccines, research, scuba– Variety of communication channels and information behaviors– Community-specific vocabularies, need for inter-community
communication (Cortical organization model)
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Taxonomy in Context:Structuring Processes and Technology Technology: infrastructure and applications
– Enterprise platforms: from creation to retrieval to application– Taxonomy as the computer network
• Applications – integrated meaning, not just data
Creation – content management, innovation, communities of practice (CoPs)
– When, who, how, and how much structure to add– Workflow with meaning, distributed subject matter experts (SMEs)
and centralized teams
Retrieval – standalone and embedded in applications and business processes
– Portals, collaboration, text mining, business intelligence, CRM
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Taxonomy in Context: The Integrating Infrastructure Starting point: knowledge architecture audit, K-Map
– Social network analysis, information behaviors People – knowledge architecture team
– Infrastructure activities – taxonomies, analytics, best bets– Facilitation – knowledge transfer, partner with SMEs
“Taxonomies” of content, people, and activities– Dynamic Dimension – complexity not chaos– Analytics based on concepts, information behaviors
Taxonomy as part of a foundation, not a project– In an Infrastructure Context
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Infrastructure Solutions: The start and foundationKnowledge Architecture Audit Knowledge Map - Understand what you have, what you
are, what you want– The foundation of the foundation
Contextual interviews, content analysis, surveys, focus groups, ethnographic studies
Category modeling – “Intertwingledness” -learning new categories influenced by other, related categories
Natural level categories mapped to communities, activities• Novice prefer higher levels• Balance of informative and distinctiveness
Living, breathing, evolving foundation is the goal
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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesPeople and Processes: Roles and Functions Knowledge Architect and learning object designers Knowledge engineers and cognitive anthropologists Knowledge facilitators and trainers and librarians Part Time
– Librarians and information architects– Corporate communication editors and writers
Partners– IT, web developers, applications programmers– Business analysts and project managers
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Infrastructure Solutions: Resources People and Processes: Central Team
Central Team supported by software and offering services– Creating, acquiring, evaluating taxonomies, metadata standards,
vocabularies– Input into technology decisions and design – content management,
portals, search– Socializing the benefits of metadata, creating a content culture– Evaluating metadata quality, facilitating author metadata– Analyzing the results of using metadata, how communities are using– Research metadata theory, user centric metadata – Design content value structure – more nuanced than good / poor
content.
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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesPeople and Processes: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer Need for Facilitators
– Amazon hiring humans to refine recommendations– Google – humans answering queries
Facilitate projects, KM project teams– Facilitate knowledge capture in meetings, best practices
Answering online questions, facilitating online discussions, networking within a community
Design and run KM forums, education and innovation fairs Work with content experts to develop training, incorporate
intelligence into applications Support innovation, knowledge creation in communities
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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesPeople and Processes: Location of Team
KM/KA Dept. – Cross Organizational, Interdisciplinary Balance of dedicated and virtual, partners
– Library, Training, IT, HR, Corporate Communication
Balance of central and distributed Industry variation
– Pharmaceutical – dedicated department, major place in the organization
– Insurance – Small central group with partners– Beans – a librarian and part time functions
Which design – knowledge architecture audit
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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesTechnology
Taxonomy Management – Text and Visualization
Entity and Fact Extraction Text Mining Search for professionals
– Different needs, different interfaces
Integration Platform technology– Enterprise Content Management
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Infrastructure Solutions: Taxonomy DevelopmentTaxonomy Model
Enterprise Taxonomy– No single subject matter taxonomy – Need an ontology of facets or domains
Standards and Customization– Balance of corporate communication and departmental specifics– At what level are differences represented?– Customize pre-defined taxonomy – additional structure, add
synonyms and acronyms and vocabulary
Enterprise Facet Model:– Actors, Events, Functions, Locations, Objects, Information
Resources– Combine and map to subject domains
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Infrastructure Solutions: Taxonomy DevelopmentInitial Development / Customization
Combination of top down and bottom up (and Essences)– Top: Design an ontology, facet selection – Bottom: Vocabulary extraction – documents, search logs,
interview authors and users– Develop essential examples (Prototypes)
• Most Intuitive Level – genus (oak, maple, rabbit)• Quintessential Chair – all the essential characteristics, no more
Map the taxonomy to communities and activities– Category differences– Vocabulary differences
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Infrastructure Solutions: Taxonomy DevelopmentEvaluate and Refine Formal Evaluation
– Quality of corpus – size, homogeneity, representative– Breadth of coverage – main ideas, outlier ideas (see next)– Structure – balance of depth and width
Practical Evaluation– Test in real life application– Test node labels with Subject Matter Experts, representative
users and documents– Test with representative key concepts– Test for un-representative strange little concepts that only
mean something to a few people but the people and ideas are key and are normally impossible to find
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Future Directions: Knowledge Organization
New analytic methods– Cognitive anthropology, history of ideas, ESNA
New metadata schemas– SCORM, RDF and semantic Web– Learning and knowledge objects
New people models– Bloom’s Taxonomy, Gardner’s 7 Intelligences
Advanced personalization– Community-based, cognitive-based– Adaptive, dynamic presentation variations
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The Contextual Desktop: Document, List of Documents, Applications Screen
Before you view:– Agent keeps you up to date– Your connections to content and
communities, your preferences– Your history and the history of other
members of your communities
When you add/change content– Suggests categorization value,
metadata values– Routes to appropriate content and
communities– Prompt on unusual connections
• Pre-existing content• Related content• Regulatory issues• Ask the question – route to experts?
When you look for information– Taxonomy-based dynamic browse– Entities
• People, companies, wells– Related content
• Regulatory, patents, BI-CI• Geological data• News stories
– Dictionaries, USGS data, databases– Experts
• Ask questions, chat When you use information
– Communities• Search, chat, email
– Performance aids, classes– Stories
Questions?
KAPS Group
Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
http://www.kapsgroup.com
