Patrick Lambe has been analyzing the knowledge, skills and experience needs of the taxonomy profession for a while and as part of this his work he is conducting a survey on the present and future of taxonomy work and the needs of taxonomy professionals. Patrick is the author of a great taxonomy development book titled "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organizational Effectiveness" and an active writer on the topic of taxonomists and taxonomy development on his Green Chameleon blog.

Patrick, like some members of our own Dow Jones taxonomy team will also be Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose this November. Acording to his orginal request for survey responses, participants in the survey will also get a report of the results (which will include additional research beyond the survey).  Patrick writes: "For those of you who believe that taxonomies still have a future, this might make interesting reading, and for those of you who believe a la Theresa Regli that “taxonomies are dead”, we’d like to hear from you on why!"

You can take the survey at http://tinyurl.com/taxonomywork

Image|Flickr|Jima

I recently attended a seminar on the 10 Steps to Business Efficiency with Content, Collaboration and Process given by the good people at AIIM (http://aiim.org) all about ECM strategies and best practices. This was a free seminar, well organized and well attended by a broad spectrum of representatives from all types of organizations, large and small, new and old industries. The topics of discussion too ranged from the most effective way to digitize archival assets; to applications to better allow for federated search across various data repositories; and then there was certainly a lot of discussion around what has become the most ubiquitous of ECM type applications, Microsoft SharePoint.

There were of course the usual quotes and statistics from AIIM, Forrester and Gartner regarding information proliferation and management today: The amount of data being produced is doubling every 18 months; 80% of this data is unstructured and 90% of that is entirely un-managed.

An interesting quote that I will paraphrase here was attributed to Thomas Washington , "The pursuit of knowledge in an age of information overload is less about the process of acquisition than it is about a proficiency of tossing things out." And regarding the storage of all of this information another interesting fact was thrown out: while 1 GB of storage may now cost an average of 20 cents, it costs $3,500 to review that same 1 GB of data and start to make sense of it in the context of your business. (AIIM)

As I listened to the various presentations and vendors I was struck by one thing: none seemed to offer a unified solution for using taxonomy more effectively to structure, classify and categorize the content that was going into these vast data repositories. Certainly it was agreed that there was value to such a process, but it is something that many organizations have still not recognized as absolutely necessary to fundamentally improve the tagging, organization and discovery of information within these huge libraries of data, documents, and other media.

It is our opinion that the integrated use of taxonomy applied to ECM applications, as well as across the rest of the enterprise, using a centralized and standardized set of vocabularies for navigation, search, discovery, meta-tagging and many other applications is a necessity in moving towards a unified means of data normalization and discoverability. To achieve this we offer services to get companies started as well as tools like Synaptica with out-of-the-box integrations to tools like SharePoint, but also more generic means of integrating with external applications via simple APIs and Web Services.

As the proliferation of data only increases over time and the means of digitizing archival records or utilizing native electronic formats becomes more efficient, storage becomes less a matter of cost and more a matter of management. The efficient means of identifying, tagging, categorizing and sorting information will be key to the effective operation of any organization.

A couple months back, my colleague also wrote up the 10 Rules of Successful ECM Implementation after attending an AAIM seminar that we have found quite useful in talking to business and technology owners about content access strategies.

We see many of our customers at the forefront of addressing these issues and working with them, we continue to work towards providing better and easier ways for data managers and end users alike to find what they are looking for. We look forward to sharing some of these use cases as well as hear from you on your successes and struggles!

Image| Flickr | ul Marqa

Here within the Dow Jones Enterprise Media group we deal with almost every kind of enterprise employee catering to their specific information delivery and management needs. From the PR Communications teams who are monitoring what people are saying about their brands across various mediums; Sales and Marketing that need to keep on top of their clients, competitors and industries; Researchers and Knowledge Managers who need depth and breath for their research and of course Investment Bankers and Traders who rely on timely and accurate content. These are just a few of them and if you are not aware of all the diverse tools and solutions we offer, our new Dow Jones Solutions site now gives you a comprehensive look by different roles, business needs and products.

Lucky for us in the Synaptica and Taxonomy Services team, we typically get to work across all different types of clients whose needs can vary drastically specifically on how they are leveraging controlled vocabularies. In future posts, I will be highlighting some of those other segments but for this post i am going to highlight "Why Taxonomy Matters" to Sales Professionals and Relationship Managers.

Have you ever tried to have a conversation about taxonomy with a sales or sales operation person in your company? Well if the conversation didn't turn to taxidermy you are probably lucky! So here are some things you can bring up next time you are in a meeting with your Sales teams and are trying to convince them that Taxonomy Matters to them- try these on for size:

Product Alignment – To better target the right customer, a taxonomy solution provides the backbone to build a faster pipeline

Territory Alignment – Segmenting companies based on region, industry, company size as well as other available categories will increase the likelihood to find the right audience

Field Sales – Combining the accurate information from product and territory alignment with the proper event triggers, sales forces will be able to pinpoint when to discuss a particular product to a potential customer

Want some more use cases for why taxonomy matters to sales? contact us daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com or use the contact form from this blog.

Last fall our Taxonomy Services group conducted a very successful Webinar focused on Taxonomy and SharePoint. Based on requests from our customers, next week we are conducting a similar session for our customers in Asia Pacific. Much like what my North American and European colleagues share with me about their regions, SharePoint adoption seems to have reached a tipping point in Asia Pacific and thus, this session will be timely and very relevant to our Asia Pacific customers.

So if you are located in the Asia Pacific region and would like an introduction to Dow Jones’ taxonomy services and a better understanding of the use and benefits of taxonomies within SharePoint, you can attend our upcoming Webinar. This practical session will demonstrate ways in which you can combine the simplicity of Sharepoint and richness of taxonomy to solve your complex information challenges.

During this session you will learn some of the basic ways to manage controlled vocabularies using standard out of the box features that you can use immediately as well as learn about our Synaptica integration into SharePoint .

Date: Wednesday 25th March

Time: 10.00am Singapore, Hong Kong

11.00am Japan
1.00pm Sydney
2.00pm New Zealand

We welcome everyone who has implemented or is looking to implement a SharePoint solution or in fact anyone who is keen on this subject to join us by registering for this session by sending an email to events.asiapacific@dowjones.com

I look forward to 'seeing' you there!

[This post is cross-posted on my personal blog]

Last month the Library of Congress released their report on their ongoing Flickr project that i have been very interested in and have written about as the project progressed. From their blog post on the report:

"Only nine months into the Library of Congress’ pilot project placing Library photos on the Web site Flickr, the photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags, according to a new report from the project team overseeing the lively project."

“The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.”

A summary of some of the outcomes:

• Increasing awareness of the digital photograph collection the Library of Congress (LC) has which has been available for years on the Library's website turning to not only an engaged audience but a lot of referral traffic to the Library's Website. "Feedback of this nature suggests that as a result of this project the Library is reaching new audiences—people who did not or could not find this material on our own site, and people who never thought to look here. "
• Gain a Better Understanding of Social Tagging and Community Input (see below for more details)
• Pilot helped the LC staff gain experience with Web 2.0 online interactions with 'patrons'

Since the beginning of the project i have been very interested in learning about some of the outcomes that the project would provide in regards to user tagging versus applied controlled vocabulary through traditional bibliographic cataloging. In the report the share that they used the Flickr API to do deeper analysis of the tagging that was done by the community (see pages 19-24 of the full report) based on nine categories that provided some interesting insight focused on issues commonly cited in comparisons of social tagging vs. assignement of controlled vocabulary terms(page 28). The categories analyzed were:

I. LC description-based (words copied from the Library-provided record): e.g., titles,
names, subjects, etc.

II. New descriptive words (words not present in the Library-provided description):

• Place: e.g., cities, counties, countries, natural feature names
• Format (physical characteristics of the original photos). Sample tags: LF, large format, black and white, bw, transparencies, glass plate
• Photographic technique. Sample tags: shallow depth of field
• Time period. Sample tags: wartime, WWII, 1912
• Creator name: e.g., photographer’s name

III. New subject words (words not present in the Library-provided description):

• Image (items seen in the image itself). Sample tags: cables, trees, apples, windows, hat, yellow
• Associations/symbolism (phrases and slogans evoked by the image). Sample tags: Rosie the riveter, Norman Rockwell, We can do it!
• Commentary (revealing the tagger’s value judgments). Sample tags: Sunday best,
• proud, dapper, vintage.
• Transcription (transcribing words found in items such as signs, posters, etc., within the photo)
• Topic (terms that convey the topic of the photo). Sample tags: architecture, navy, baseball, story
• Humor (tags intended to be humorous rather than descriptive) Sample tags: UFO, flying saucer

IV. Emotional/aesthetic responses: (personal reactions of the tagger). Sample tags: wow,
pretty, ugly, controversial

V. Personal knowledge/research (tags that could only have been added based on knowledge or research by the tagger, and that could not have been gleaned solely from the description provided or examination of the photo): For example, the tag murder used on a portrait of someone who was later murdered or tags added for the specific county when that information was not part of the description.

VI. Machine tags (added by the community not Library-supplied): e.g., geotags and Iconclass tags

VII. Variant forms (representing terms already tagged but in a different form, such as synonyms (e.g., WW2, WWII, World War II, worldwarii) or plural/singular differences (e.g., transparency/transparencies)

VIII. Foreign language (tags in foreign languages/scripts, whether they are translations of English-language tags, or new tags)

IX. Miscellaneous (tags that are not readily understood, that provide corrections to LC descriptions or to other taggers (e.g., not peaches), or tags later removed

Some of the Future Tag Analysis Interests (page 29) are also quite interesting such as actually incorporating popular concepts or variants into the LC's own controlled vocabularies (yeah something i advocate in the hybrid approach!), bringing the tags into the LC's search environment, populate bibliographic records with tags (although that have already added the Flickr URL to the "additional version available" field (MARC field 530) in some catalog records which leads users to the appropriate Flickr page that might provide historical information etc. on the image that is vaulable- see sample on page 36).

In the report they also share some of the experiences the staff learned from using Web2.0 tools in interacting with patrons that might be different from the traditional reference desk exchanges (page 37).

The good news? Skip to page 38 of the full report to see the recommendations and conculsions including details of headcount that is necessary for the program to continue and expand. But the report ends with the following good news:

"It should come as no surprise, then, that the Flickr team recommends that this experiment in Web 2.0 cease to be characterized as a pilot and evolve to an expanded involvement in this growing community (and other appropriate social networking opportunities that may arise) as resources permit. The benefits appear to far outweigh the costs and risks. "

The entire set of tags that have been applied can be seen alphabetically or as a tag cloud of the 150 most popular tags.

Many thanks to the Library of Congress staff for taking on this project and continuously sharing their progress through their blog as well as other resources (see Appendix C) and to the authors of the project report: Michelle Springer, Beth Dulabahn, Phil Michel, Barbara Natanson, David Reser, David Woodward, and Helena Zinkham!