Articles, Metadata

This article appeared in the KMWorld May 2012 WhitePaper, Best Practices in Intelligent Search.  To receive KMWorld content, including this Whitepaper visit KMWorld.com.

Search is a conversation. If you ask me a question and I don’t understand, I can ask you for more information. With time you learn more about my interests, and can give better answers. Well-designed, intelligent search systems can do the same. We can facilitate this dialog by addressing three critical requirements for effective search. These are:

1. Search needs to feel like navigation
2. Search needs to be personal
3. Search needs to be adaptive, improving over time

1.     Search needs to feel like navigation

People find answers through haphazard and chaotic processes. Are you a searcher or a browser? It really depends. Most people shift perspectives between the two modes. We search when we know what we want and are trying to retrieve something. We browse when we don’t know what we want and need to discover knowledge. Navigational structures can teach us about available content, but we tend to shift back and forth between retrieval and discovery.  

Most consumers are now very familiar with faceted navigation. Search terms are part of the left navigation. When you click on a particular size, color, or brand, the system executes a query. A relevant result set is returned. The user can also see how many documents that contain each term are in the collection. Search terms that make no sense or that would lead to zero results fall off the list, so users will not go down blind alleys.

This article, by Jeannine Bartlett and Seth Earley, was published on RetailOnlineIntegration.com on June 29, 2011.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. They're valuable and are used throughout the web development process. Certainly the web is comprised entirely of standards, from HTTP to HTML, web services, transaction processes, linked data processes and new methods of sharing information across shopping channels like Milo.

This article, by Seth Earley, was published on CIOUPDATE.COM on August 3, 2011.  

Business changes faster than technology can support. That is just a fact of a CIO’s life. But there are ways to improve organizational agility and better support the demands of an ever-changing enterprise. This three part series will discuss various strategies for better meeting business needs.

In this article, I focus on how to create a context for amplifying the business value of information. My straight-forward proposition is that organizations that focus on core practices for effective access to and integration of information get more value from IT investments.

The resistance to addressing information access and integration head-on is that it seems like a “boiling the ocean” problem. It doesn’t need to be. It is possible to focus on a business critical solution, but throughout the effort maintain an enterprise perspective designed to build information value incrementally.

Here’s the recipe.

1. Focus on a specific process as a starting point.
2. Create common business language across the enterprise.
3. Embed that language in tools, systems and processes to create new business capabilities and agility.
4. Create governance and change management programs to leverage these capabilities in day to day work processes.
5. Apply accepted practices to unstructured content processes to promote better information hygiene.
6. Measure the information management process.
7. Measure business impact of new practices, and
8. Repeat on department by department basis.

What follows is an elaboration of each of these steps:

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content creation to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, and at lower cost. Our research shows that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. We examine the metadata capabilities within DITA (and content management systems), discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Managing content — whether documents, transactional data or digital assets — is about providing content in context. Users can't find what they need for many reasons: (1) information and systems evolve and tend toward a disordered state; (2) in most organizations governance processes around asset management, search, taxonomy and metadata are immature; (3) content is not "selectively managed. In this interview we discuss a number of issues around content management, taxonomy, tagging, metadata and search, and provide some ideas on how to tackle the chaos to create business value. Access full article...

The information age poses all kinds of challenges, the most fundamental of which is how to find things — this article explores how a taxonomy, through the application of metadata, can help users find exactly what they need.

According to a recent nationwide study, roughly 33 million American internet users use a search engine to locate information at least once a day. The only task that was completed more often was checking email.  It is clear that the use of search engines has become a part of daily life and a necessary utility for finding information. However the question of how to best apply and leverage search in varied information environments, such as databases, portals, and websites has yet to be adequately answered.