John Heffernan's blog

This is a continuation of last month's post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos.

Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and metadata in a variety of scenarios including accounting, databases and inter/intra-net based applications to provide structure and organize information.  All this is normal and straightforward.  Chaos arises, however, when a business manager or executive asks questions that cut-across systems.  When, for example, they want to be able to integrate engineering data, customer-oriented product information, customer information, and customer service complaints to identify new product-lines and solution opportunities. 

To achieve the goal of visualizing a business problem by mining information repositories in a creative way to address complex issues involving multiple data repositories, taxonomies and metadata must be aligned to establish a comprehensive "single source of truth."  The concept of a single source of truth is the mantra in the drive to put Master Data Management (MDM) into practice.  However, the effort comes with certain practical and serious challenges.  The most significant being the fact that different and well-governed information systems have different semantics and different metadata standards.  Achieving semantic interoperability is a serious challenge, especially as business systems and network service architectures develop to meet organizational needs to adapt to a rapidly changing technology environment.

So what to do?  How do organizations find ways to capture, manage, and derive understanding from a wide range of sources including its internal expertise resources and the stream of information provided by social media channels?

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.

Clink, clink went two halves of a Japanese rifle shell case on my researcher's desk at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland. They fell from the envelope attached to a memorandum in the folder I took from the large, archival documents box belonging RG-319, Office of Assistant Secretary, Army Staff Operations. The memorandum discussed problems associated with placing Imperial Japanese Army rifles under U.S. Army control back into service as part of the mobilization effort in Japan in response to rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula between 1948 and 1950. It was a good plan except: 1) the parts of the Japanese rifles were hand-crafted by each soldier during final assembly at time of issue and were unique and therefore the guns lacked interchangeable replacement parts; 2) the shells were designed for the gun bore, and 3) the US military had no practical means to mass produce shells for these archaic weapons.

This story illustrates a number of important points. A theory requires supporting knowledge to establish its actual goodness. Knowledge is a work product that moves through an organization. The repository for a work product artifact can be in an unusual place. Navigating to that place requires both an external structure and a diligent, informed seeker. Once accessed, retrieval results may include both target and unanticipated, serendipitous materials.