While it’s no surprise that pizza and cake provide the essential fuel that powers many software development projects, it is a pleasure when one of our customers has a specially decorated cake made to celebrate the successful deployment of their customized Synaptica taxonomy management software. The project, completed this month, was a collaboration between Synaptica and the content management team at Elsevier, Netherlands.

  

Please let us know if you have any comments or questions.

On Tuesday October 16, 2012 please join us at Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington DC for a presentation on, "Chaos-Control: Enterprise Management of Federated Taxonomies" from  2:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.

Jim Sweeney, Product manager for Synaptica will disccus the problems and suggest solutions surounding Enterprise taxonomy management.

Here is a synopsis of the presentation:

Enterprise taxonomy is generally synonymous with centralized taxonomy just as federated taxonomy is generally synonymous with decentralized taxonomy. Each model has its pros and cons. What happens when an organization needs both the efficiency and cross-searchability associated with centralized taxonomy management and the autonomy and heterogeneity associated with decentralized taxonomy management? Drawing upon real-life examples this presentation compares and contrasts the two models and then explores various hybrid solutions, which bridge the divide to combine and deliver advantages from the alternative approaches.

We hope to see you there!

[Taxonomy Bootcamp Takeaway] In a case study presentation Dave Clarke of Synaptica described how the Taxonomy Warehouse online directory had been re-engineered as an ontology.   Clarke said one of the essential differences between the legacy system and the new system is that in the old system, an information search terminated with results and individual records, whereas in the new system, there are no dead-ends: whatever you are looking at, the ontology provides new paths and more information discovery options.  Clarke gave an example where a search for a blog leads to a bio about the blogger, which then leads to a description of the company they work for.  This leads to information about products and services the company provides.  From here links to generic product and services types open the window on all the other companies providing similar products and services. Dave's presentation is available from: .

[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Takaway] Joseph Busch of Project Performance Corporation (PPC) delivered a practical presentation that aimed to help people understand objective criteria for evaluating the capabilities of current taxonomy software tools.  PPC is a leading management consultancy with a growing taxonomy practice.   Busch analysed editorial functionality, degrees of sophistication, database definition, import and export options, and workflow and governance.  Busch then gave detailed descriptions for four specific products and summarized the results in a product vector with two axes: ease of implementation and completeness of vision.  Microsoft Excel scored top on ease of implementation but low on vision (functionality).  While MultiTes did not score high on either scale it was selected as a notable tool because its simplicity and low price point have established it as a prominent entry-level tool.   The three tools closest to the top-right quadrant were SmartLogic, Synaptica and TopBraid.  In Busch’s assessment these three tools are very close together, with each one having some distinguishing selling points. Joseph's presentation is available online at: .

[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Takeaway] Zach Wahl of Project Performance Corporation (PPC) said that the average taxonomy application is deeper and more complex than five years ago, and so the need for more sophisticated taxonomy software tools is becoming widely recognized.  PPC is a leading management consultancy with a growing taxonomy practice.  Wahl’s comments drew upon observations of the evolution of RFP requirements over the last few years. Zach's presentation is available at: .

[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Takeaway] KM patrician Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge gave a passionate talk about ‘empirical approaches to taxonomy’.  Drawing upon many battle-stories from his long experience in the KM consulting field, Lambe described how senior managers in many organizations often attempt to dictate the content and structure of taxonomies based on arbitrary whims and subjective opinions.  Imperious Lambe counters such meddling with an engagement model and strategy based on empirical taxonomy construction.  Lambe revealed how the testing and consulting processes of the empirical approach are supported by three compelling pillars: content warrant – the concepts and language found in the content; user warrant – the concepts and language that users bring to their searches; and de facto warrant – established domain authority files and schemes. Patrick's presentation is available for download at: http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/an_empirical_approach_to_ta....

[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Comment] While many organizations employ multiple software tools to perform similar functions, such as categorization, search, etc., this does not necessarily imply tool redundancy.  Particular tools have different strengths that are optimized for tackling different data sets or functional tasks within an enterprise.  There is, however, a very real need to orchestrate these tools.  Dave Clarke of Synaptica has long advocated that conceptual vocabularies combined with non-proprietary open standards are the key to unifying information that resides in disparate systems. Industry standards inform both the way vocabularies are constructed and the way they are interchanged.  Foremost among relevant norms is the brand new two-part ISO25964 standard (and its various national antecedents and implementations) and the W3C specifications SKOS and OWL.  Centralizing all controlled vocabularies into an enterprise vocabulary management tool allows different business units to maintain separate vocabularies while providing the means to 'wire' these different vocabularies together through mapping alignments.  For more information on the ISO standard visit: http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/details.aspx?vunid=113659 and http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/details.aspx?vunid=113662.

[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Takeaway] In a witty and informative sponsored lunchtime keynote Jeremy Bentley of SmartLogic surveyed the high ground that sits above text mining, search, content, metadata and classification.  Bentley named this high ground as ‘content intelligence,’ which also happens to be the brand name for SmartLogic’s enterprise platform.  Bentley observed that many organizations have multiple software tools to perform each of the core functions (multiple auto-categorization tools, multiple CMS tools, etc.), and that coordinating these disparate tools underpins the evolution to content intelligence and the semantic web.  The presentation is not available online, for more information visit www.smartlogic.com.

Very good video by Patrick Lambe (Straits Knowledge) and Matt Moore (Innotecture): "Taxonomy Fairy Tales" about the myths and misconceptions about taxonomy management.

Our Partner PPC are offering an excellent series of webinars on SharePoint that we wanted to make you aware of:

Roadmap your Path to SharePoint 2010 Webinar Series - Strategies to Maximize your ROI

 

Session Two: Designing Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010: Leveraging new features and taxonomy/metadata best practices

Tuesday, September 14, 2010 11:30am - 12:30pm EST

The information architecture for SharePoint 2010 site collections will lay a critical foundation for configuring sites and libraries, as well as for the success of end users’ adoption and their ability to find content. SharePoint 2010’s expanded features include management tools for metadata and keywords. This webinar will discuss the fundamentals of taxonomy and metadata, how these elements map to SharePoint 2010 features, and best practices for designing and implementing taxonomy and metadata within SharePoint 2010.

Presenters: Jill Tabuchi, PPC and Bill Hutchison, AEA

Intended Audience: Business Sponsor, Information Worker, IT Manager, IT Professional

Click to start the registration process at Project Performance Corporation. This registration is for Session Two: Designing Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010: Leveraging new features and taxonomy/metadata best practices on Tuesday, September 14, 2010.

Contact PPC for more information about how to leverage SharePoint 2010 within your organization by clicking on the logo below.