I have recently celebrated my one year anniversary with Dow Jones. It has been quite a year! I wear several hats here and that has given me the opportunity to meet a great deal of people in all areas of the business. How does it feel after a year? It feels great - I continue to be impressed with the caliber of talent exhibited by my colleagues. The domain knowledge, the business savvy, the passion for their work - it is very exciting and motivating to be surrounded by these people.

Yes - I love working with the core Dow Jones teams: the product champions, the technical staff, the marketing, sales and strategy teams for Factiva, Newswires, the Wall Street Journal. Yes, I also think it's pretty cool to talk to folks in other parts of NewsCorp: MySpace, Slingshot, Fox Interactive.

Today though I want to highlight some of the people I work most closely with. I'll start with some you haven't met yet on our blog - my internally focused team of Metadata Managers who, with their teams, keep our content organized: Frances, Annika and Bouriana. Three very bright and talented women who have a significant impact on the structure of Dow Jones' Intelligent Indexing, they quietly and diligently work to improve the quality of our content indexing to ensure the most relevant documents are returned in Search and Discovery. They are the champions of new branches of our taxonomies, builders of our ontologies, curators of our primary intellectual assets. And everyone here wants to build on their work - it's a significant part of our metadata platform. Huzzah ladies - and thank you for your dedication!

Then there's Marti Heyman. Who you'd have met by now if Daniela had her way! (Only partially teasing here Marti!) Marti and I joined Dow Jones at the same time to fill the shoes of two incredible folks - Dave Clarke and Trish Yancey - who were moving on after seeing to the smooth integration of their company, Synapse, after it's acquisition by Dow Jones. I got the product side, Marti got the consulting side of Taxonomy Services. It's been my pleasure to have known Marti for several years. For a long time it's been a small world, this group of corporate taxonomists, and we've had the pleasure of speaking together, chatting on TaxoCoP calls, and now working together to take this organization to the next level, taxonomically speaking. Marti's depth of knowledge, experience, and willingness to roll up her sleeves continues to impress me. I also love that she gets a few bees in her bonnet! (Perhaps someday we'll have her tell you about why you can't use ROI as a success metric for taxonomies!)

Marti's team has been a great joy to work with too - Ian and Dan have some of the most sophisticated knowledge of practical applications of cataloging and classification I've encountered outside the academic and library world. They are a phenomenal resource for our consulting clients. And how can you not love someone who puts up thousands of Christmas trees - as Laura and her family do each and every year - with every ornament cataloged?! Now, that's a true taxonomy geek!

Of course, this being a blog for Synaptica, I cannot overlook a team that practically runs itself: Jim S., Jim D., Sean and Daniela are the folks who make Synaptica what it is. Jim and Sean are the core of our technical team, and have the ability to deliver excellent code and great customer service. Mostly, I love that they don't groan too much when Daniela and I dream up some crazy new idea! They are usually right there with us, and I appreciate their creativity and willingness to try new things with the product. Jim S. is the pillar of the team, our Product Manager, Customer Champion, Pre-Sales Support, Trainer, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer! He takes great pride in his work and is one of the best PMs it has been my pleasure to work with. What can I say about Daniela? I daresay most of you know her already. One of the next Robert Scobles, Data Portability advocate, Super Librarian, She Geek. Daniela is our Business Development Manager, and in the last year she has done more good for Synaptica and Taxonomy Services than I ever could have hoped for. She is a true customer advocate, true Dow Jones advocate, and isn't afraid to do what it takes to get the job done. I've said how glad I am to work with her before, and I'll say it again: she is a force to be reckoned with - work with her if you can!

There are so many other wonderful people here, I'm looking forward to getting to know them better. We have an incredible team, and I encourage you to reach out to them to talk shop, to talk tech, to talk business. We are one of the few companies with capabilities that run the full spectrum of content management: indexing & classification, taxonomy management, ontologies, content creation, integration, processing & delivery, archiving and user interaction; and we enjoy our work immensely. We look forward to hearing from you!

Flickr image by daintytime

I am approximately 5,371 miles (8,645 km) from London in sunny California but hope that even this far away i can enjoy and learn from the various outputs that i predict will be coming out of the Online Information 2008 Conference- including making some new connections by joining in on the conversation remotely!

Just yesterday on my Sunday afternoon walk i listened to a few episodes of the Panlibus podcast series leading to the conference including the Conference Chairman Adrian Dale's overview of the conference and a preview of Clay Shirky's keynote who I am a fan of and who is of course making some interesting predictions about the industry.

If you are at the conference there is a Crowdvine site setup where you can connect with fellow attendees which i will keep an eye on. But of course i plan to follow the Twitter conversation with this search i created of some of the possible hashtags that attendees will be using. There is also a listing of Bloggers on the conference site that will probably be blogging the conference as i am sure many others will be doing.

Our UK based Dow Jones team will be at the conference and in addition to attending the conference and exhibiting , Dow Jones will also be presenting these sessions:

Simon Alterman will be conducting a Seminar titled: Proving your Value as a Research Team in the Current Financial Situation - On Tuesday 10:30-11 in the Gallery Rooms where he will take a look at the changing nature of the Info Pro role within organisations and why the technologies and processes they are adopting can act as catalysts for growth. Simon is a dynamic speaker and a great advocate for the profession.

Mark Stapleton will be presenting on Effective News Integration for Better Business Decisions - on Wednesday at 15:30 in Theater A. Mark has years of experience in delivering solutions to clients and has lead our European team as they delivered some great solutions that drive our customers' bottom-lines.

And me?

Well i will be in sunny San Francisco at our office downtown and on Twitter (@danielabarbosa and @synaptica)- but if you stop by the Dow Jones booth- mention that you saw this post, drop your business card and tell them you want Daniela to send you some California sunshine- i will send you something special from California. See ya in the cloud! (the cloud where sun and rain don't matter that is!)

An overview of how the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group uses semantic technologies / solutions for our own organization and for customers. This brief presentation was given at MIT to the Cambridge Semantic Web meetup on October 14, 2008.

My name is Ian Davis, and I'm a Global Project Delivery Manager working in the Client Solutions Taxonomy Delivery Team and based in our London office. I work to develop and deliver a range of content and information solutions for our global clients. Projects can include discovery assessments, taxonomy strategy and creation, taxonomy mapping, search support, information architecture and website development. I also assist in the marketing and deployment of Synaptica, a semantic management tool offered by Dow Jones, and the website www.taxonomywarehouse.com.

My particular areas of interest include: developing taxonomies, thesauri, and metadata schemas, manual and automated indexing of still and moving images, deploying and using Synaptica controlled vocabulary software, the challenges of managing teams of geographically dispersed information workers, website creation and development, and the localisation of content into multi-lingual environments"

I joined Dow Jones in February, 2006, after 13 years developing taxonomy and indexing solutions for still images libraries at both Corbis Corporation and Photonica (formerly part of Amana Japan and now part of Getty Images). At Corbis, I served as head of the UK division’s image cataloguing department. At Photonica, I worked to create and implement the e-commerce website www.iconica.com and was responsible for the development of www.photonica.com. I also developed, implemented and maintained all vocabularies underpinning the classification and retrieval of Photonica's extensive digital image content. One aspect of this included creating an extensive English language thesaurus and managing the localisation of that controlled vocabulary into five European languages. I managed a team of ten still image indexers and five thesaurus developers. After leaving Photonica, I worked as an independent consultant for BUPA in the area of metadata and taxonomy creation and development, and the implementation of an enterprise search solution.

Most of my time is currently spent working on the delivery of a major client engagement in Asia. I'm managing a team of geographically dispersed staff who are working on the customisation of a large topical thesaurus and the creation of various browsable taxonomies. We're also creating a multi-lingual thesaurus by translating the large English thesaurus into three other languages and tying the whole lot together. If that wasn't enough, we're also involved in the mapping of the vocabularies we're working on to both legacy internal client vocabularies and to third party ones. We're also starting to consider how to move these thesauri and taxonomies into the world of ontologies."

Welcome to Synaptica Central!

This morning, before officially launching this site, I had occasion to speak with some very smart folks at a small technology company in Illinois. Our conversation ranged across many semantic topics, but it was refreshing to find like minds on the topic of complexity, and it I'd like to share some of the thoughts I had coming out of the meeting.