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The Quieter Side of Semantic Technology
Submited by searley on
January 15, 2012 - 1:00 GMT

January is always a good time to reflect back and look forward.

Right now, I am preparing a short talk on semantic technology and the public sector.  In researching this topic, it occurred to me that "semantic technology" had a different ring to it in 2008 than it does now.  At the time, there was a lot of buzz as people began to think about how machine interpretation of unstructured content, distributed across the web, required machines to get at the meaning of content. A quest for the semantic web was born and that popularized the concept of "semantic technology."  Today, when I checked Google Adwords, "Semantic Technology" gets 6,600 monthly searches. That's not much. "SharePoint" gets over 7 million.

Although it may seem that the shine is gone, what we have is another case of visionaries boiling the ocean, with engineers following with more focused attention to tractable problems. Of course, as IBM's Watson demonstrated by winning Jeopardy this year (see my column "Is IBM Watson Technology Practical for the Enterprise"), conceptual maps can be quite powerful when focused on specific areas of knowledge. IBM is now working on developing even deeper but narrower uses of Watson for healthcare applications.

Although there was a big splash around Watson, what is more interesting is the steady progress of semantic technology in 2011. This is particularly true with regard to two important trends. One is growing interest in standard ontologies for modeling the meaning of data within specific domains; and the other, the trend to leverage ontologies in framing complex business rules for data analysis.  

Web 2.0? That's so 2009. Here's Web 3.0: Taxonomy and Semantic Search
Submited by johnh on
August 22, 2011 - 4:52 GMT

The heart of Web 3.0 is semantics.  Semantics focuses on what one means to say, not just what one actually says.  Semantics is the difference between salient search results and an unfocused aggregation of … stuff.  Algorithms used by search engines are an effort to discern the meaning and rank relevance against users short, ambiguous, approximation of intent expressed in their search queries.  Web 3.0 semantics represents a significant advance over current search technologies because it attempts to look at meaning inherent in the content itself. 

To understand how this works and the role taxonomy plays in this search for meaning a little review maybe helpful.  Taxonomy categorizes information into a unified structure and controls the language to describe those categories.  Under this definition, the contributions of taxonomy are labeling, designing content, providing navigation patterns, and managing the relationship among content units.  These roles for taxonomy are essential to successful site development, especially as sites are increasingly dynamic, drawing content directly out of content management systems, and increasingly socialized to the point that systems rooted in databases are no longer able to scale to meet the storage demands.

Taxonomy is an integral part of a content producer's tools kit for adding metadata to their site.  Metadata presents an interpretive model for understanding content data, or the types of data actually evaluated by search engine algorithms.

Content Choreography - The Art of Dynamic Web Content
Submited by Jbartlett on
August 12, 2011 - 4:35 GMT

Earley & Associates recently announced a webinar series on Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography is Critical to Information Management. Since you may be asking yourself, “what is content choreography?” we thought we’d share the history of the term and what we mean by it.

Back in March of 2011, a major global high tech company engaged Earley & Associates to work on the redesign of a major website, site search, metadata and all new web CMS and DAM infrastructure. It was an enormous undertaking, headed by Marketing and involving brand managers, the SEO team, content authors, creative agencies, a systems integrator, a user experience design agency, technical consultants, and the IT department. The existing sites were to migrate from traditional navigation, search and single page content to a totally new paradigm of dynamic content collections, where user context would be driven by the search experience more than by navigation or site depth. With personalization. And in multiple languages. Taxonomy and metadata would play an important role in each of these areas, but just how well the whole system was going to hang together (“If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately...”) was a real concern, and the very reason we’d been called in as a sort of SWAT team.

Semantic Technology 2011 Conference - Ontology is the New Taxonomy
Submited by rwalker on
June 15, 2011 - 12:02 GMT

I spent a couple of days recently at the Semantic Technology 2011 conference in San Francisco.  A number of different themes and implementations struck a chord with me – and I could overview these all together at length.  But for now I will focus on two particular implementations that showcase both success, for all of us to learn from, and themes/directions, for information management professionals to pay heed to.  These two themes, in my view of this conference, are: Ontology is the New Taxonomy and Managing Vocabulary to Build Semantics-Based Knowledge Experiences.

In this post I want to begin a discussion on the first--using semantic technology to build ontology-based websites--by telling the story of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) World Cup Website.  Quite apart from it being a landmark achievement, there are also huge implications for those who build taxonomies – since taxonomies as we currently know them (“flat” hierarchies, faceted or not) are likely going to play a more minor role in the emerging semantic web world.  

This presentation by John O’Donovan (now at the Press Association, but then chief architect of BBC News and Sport Interactive) of the work at the BBC was the first that strongly resonated with me.

Briefly stated, The BBC's World Cup web site was almost certainly the biggest (at its time) pure-play implementation of semantic web technologies on a commercial media site.  Or … as one pundit put it …if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country.”  There you go … Brit humor in action.  If you can’t excel at the sport …  then at least you can excel at something else.  I, being British, love it. :-)

Is Metadata About the Content?
Submited by searley on
April 20, 2011 - 4:43 GMT

I just returned from the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, recently held in NYC where I presented a short talk on the role of taxonomy in social media. This conference focuses on solutions that discover business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback.  I used my Blackberry to tweet ideas in real time during the session (hash tag SAS11).

This combination of immediacy and mobility has interesting implications for business. Consumers are connected to the feedback and opinion of others and are increasingly using their devices to research products and services through multiple mechanisms.

We'll be addressing aspects of this in our session this week on "Optimizing the Information Supply Chain for Competitive Advantage" where we will discuss how optimized supply chains, cross channel shopping and mobile commerce will require integrated taxonomies and metadata.

Healthcare and Electronic Health Records is the topic of a two part call we are presenting in May.  This is another area where the development of systems that can provide immediate and accurate information about patient health will depend on taxonomies. Patient safety data, evidence based medicine and integration of diagnostic and patient management systems along with a range of other methods to improve quality and control costs will require harmonization of complex healthcare and life sciences information sources.

Setting New Objectives: Summary of Taxonomy Bootcamp 2009 Openers & Themes
Submited by slemieux on
November 24, 2009 - 9:23 GMT

Subtitle: The Future of Taxonomy... Ad Nauseum

This year's Taxonomy Bootcamp conference was much like years prior: full of great information, knowledgeable speakers, and a ton of self-doubt/-defense/-definition. Which is ironic: professional organizers who struggle to classify themselves. There were at least 3 major sessions dealing with the taxonomist's identity and future (in a 2-day conference with a single track, that's a lot), which left me feeling a bit estranged.

The opening session by Patrick Lambe discussed the identity of the "new taxonomist" in the field, using results from a survey of members of the Taxonomy Community of Practice. His findings were unsurprising to me at least: 

Podcast on Folksonomy & Taxonomy in the Enterprise
Submited by slemieux on
June 11, 2009 - 9:00 GMT

I had the great pleasure of doing a podcast a few weeks ago with Paul Miller, podcaster for Nodalities (magazine & blog), on hybrid approaches to folksonomy and taxonomy and their role in the enterprise.

We discussed the now tired debate of folksonomy vs. taxonomy, and focused on the strengths and applications of each approach. I covered how organizations are leveraging social tagging and what some of the pitfalls are in the enterprise context.

I also talk a lot a few of the hybrid approaches to taxonomy & folksonomy:

  • Co-existence
  • Tag-influenced taxonomy
  • Taxonomy-influenced tagging
  • Tag hierarchies
ZigTag Finally Launches Semantic Bookmarking
Submited by slemieux on
May 07, 2009 - 8:00 GMT

So, I seem to have not been on the right RSS feed, because I totally missed the memo that ZigTag finally launched at the end of 2008.  I had signed up for the restricted Beta some time ago (there were 500 or so participants), and was awaiting the live version anxiously. ZigTag is a tagging/bookmarking tool that uses "defined" tags, whereby users choose from a controlled set of tags (through auto-complete) with semantic distinctions managed in a knowledge base.

For example, if you start typing in "Ital...", it will start populating a drop-down of choices asking you if you mean, Ital (Rastafarian food), Italy (the country), Italian (Culture of Italy), etc.  If there are multiple versions of one word (synonyms), they use parenthetical qualifiers to define them. Hovering over a term also brings up definitions (brought in from Wikipedia).

ZigTag Screen Shot

I think this tool is a great example of a hybrid between taxonomy and folksonomy... or even between ontology and folksonomy. We are able to eliminate many of the ptifalls of social tagging, such as:

Syndicated research projects
Submited by searley on
July 14, 2006 - 10:30 GMT

One of the things we have noticed is that there are lots of interesting areas for companies to explore in terms of process and technology, but not a lot of resources that can be devoted to exploration without a cost justifiable outcome. So for example, someone might have a departmental budget of $10k or $20k to look into a new area, but that would not be enough to adequately explore the issue at hand. However if several organizations pooled those resources for a common research agenda, then each could have the benefit of a larger project for the cost of their contribution.

Based on conversations I have had with a number of firms, Topic Maps may be a good area for us to organize a syndicated research project around. Here is a rough description of the project. Contact me if you are interested in participating.