Applications for eTaxonomy

In an earlier blog, I introduced the term eTaxonomy.   ETaxonomy represents “embedded taxonomies”.  Many kinds of IT solutions rely on taxonomy as a core organizing principle (reference data, content object models, information architecture, metadata schemas, etc)  as opposed to simply being a navigational construct.   In this blog, I discuss applications of eTaxonomy from our recent client work.  Of note are:

• Search
• Document and Records Management
• Content Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Ecommerce
• Marketing Campaign Management

Search                           

Search is about metadata.  A search application “derives” metadata by creating an index of the content.  The index is information about the content, i.e. metadata. The search tool uses the index to locate documents and pages.  This “derived metadata” can be enriched by adding attributes or keywords with terms defined in a taxonomy.  Taxonomy provides a hierarchical structure of controlled vocabulary terms.   With this structure, search-enabled applications can present related concepts, broaden or narrow the search, and filter results based on “facets” or attributes.  The use of related terms (developed with a “thesaurus” – taxonomy on steroids) provides tremendous power in search applications.

Document and Records Management

There are many types of document management applications, from those that provide loosely federated collections of documents to those in which documents must be of specific types and controlled through precise workflow.    These tools require taxonomies and metadata standards in order to function correctly.   A taxonomy provides the logical hierarchy of terms needed to define business policies and processes for creating, managing, and ultimately disposing of documents.

Content Management              

Content management goes beyond document management when document templates are created for the capture of content.  Recently many organizations are turning to SharePoint for content management. Many of them are finding that it’s not enough to define document templates.  The challenge is to come up with a robust controlled vocabulary for specifying document attributes.  Many organizations don’t take a disciplined approach to this and fail to get the benefits of enterprise content management.   SharePoint 2010 allows for term management and content type development across site collection. Unfortunately, this means more room for poor design.  eTaxonomists to the rescue!

Successful SharePoint architectures require a well-designed taxonomy for the attributes of each document template. Without that, content is difficult to find and search does not function as expected.   

Digital Asset Management

Digital assets include images, video, rich media, audio, marketing components and composites.  Since images are invisible to search without labels or metadata, asset management systems require effective taxonomies.

We are seeing many new tools and techniques that rely on eTaxonomy.  For instance, applications that allow for metadata extraction based on speech recognition and speech to text conversion.  Once there is a text representation, these applications apply entity extraction algorithms to a particular segment, matching terms to a controlled vocabulary. These terms become the metadata tags for this particular segment.  This approach has tremendous application to new sources of user created content leveraging archival video, secondary or stock footage, e-learning content, archives of conference presentations and many other sources of rich media that until now have remained underutilized.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce has long been married to taxonomy.  Until recently, taxonomies have been relatively flat controlled vocabularies for product attributes such as size, style, brand, price, and color.  Recently, however, richer and deeper taxonomies have been driving much more complex and dynamic web presentation.   It’s now becoming state of the art to display featured products, suggest additions to shopping carts, and to provide access to related documentation, brochures, log posts, customer ratings and comments, etc.     It’s all about finding related information.  How is that done?  By using taxonomies to find “similar” products and “similar” customers. 

Campaign management

Campaigns use multiple channels for reaching out to customers and prospects.  These might be email and physical mail, sales calls, web campaigns, advertising vehicles and any number of virtual or face-to-face events.  Integrated campaign management is used to measure the effectiveness, spend, reach, response, and variation of marketing touch points for target customers.  Campaign management requires customer segmentation, media channel, media type, format, placement, frequency, ad type, roles, relationships, resources, program type, account type, call type, contact type, and/or interaction type.

Organizations would like to understand how a customer responds, given a mix of contacts through various channels.  Unfortunately, this is challenging as each channel may be managed and monitored with very different tools.  One of our pharmaceutical clients, for example, uses electronic detailing applications to track how representatives interact with physicians, email marketing tools, market tracking tools to measure response from various traditional channels, and sales force management tools to track revenue generating impact.  Each of these systems uses different terminology and a different data representation to track information.  Consequently, consolidated reporting or big picture understanding of effectiveness and ROI is extremely difficult, requiring manual normalization of data.

We are using eTaxonomy techniques to harmonize disparate data sources.  This provides Integration through “ontology”.  As a result, marketing activities can be consolidated and integrated for greater control, improved effectiveness and increased ROI.

Summary

The above just provide a few opportunities for getting value from eTaxonomy.  In future blogs I will cover additional solutions that can benefit from eTaxonomy.   I will also be blogging on lessons learned around how to succeed with eTaxonomy in large organizations.  Also, check out our Insight Webinar Series for a deep dive into eTaxonomy solutions and approaches.