Look at the most successful organizations and what stands out is an ability to react quickly to changing markets. This agility is the result of ensuring that business processes, workflows, and communications between business groups move freely.
The structure and integration created by the implementation of taxonomy are the building blocks for improving efficiency and collaboration. Taxonomy provides the organizational concepts and content categorization that set a business’s pace for information organization, access, findability, and reuse. These improvements lead to reduced costs for delivering services, developing products and conducting operations.
How can taxonomy impact the bottom line of your organization? What are the advantages of taxonomy vs. technology solutions for improving knowledge flow?
Join Earley & Associates CEO Seth Earley for a sixty-minute rundown of the theory, practice and business benefits of taxonomy. You’ll come away with 5 best practices, drawn from real world experience in a wide variety of industries, to boost your bottom line and beat the competition through taxonomy design and semantic integration.
And bring your manager - taxonomy design and integration projects are among the most cost effective and unobtrusive ways you can boost your bottom line while beating the competition.
Look at the most successful organizations and what stands out is an ability to react quickly to changing markets. This agility is the result of ensuring that business processes, workflows, and communications between business groups move freely.
The structure and integration created by the implementation of taxonomy are the building blocks for improving efficiency and collaboration. Taxonomy provides the organizational concepts and content categorization that set a business’s pace for information organization, access, findability, and reuse. These improvements lead to reduced costs for delivering services, developing products and conducting operations.
How can taxonomy impact the bottom line of your organization? What are the advantages of taxonomy vs. technology solutions for improving knowledge flow?
Join Earley & Associates CEO Seth Earley for a sixty-minute rundown of the theory, practice and business benefits of taxonomy. You’ll come away with 5 best practices, drawn from real world experience in a wide variety of industries, to boost your bottom line and beat the competition through taxonomy design and semantic integration.
And bring your manager - taxonomy design and integration projects are among the most cost effective and unobtrusive ways you can boost your bottom line while beating the competition.
The need to repurpose content through multiple digital channels gives rise to the need to track and manage rights. It’s no longer sufficient to treat content rights as the legal department’s problem or to confine rights information to a spreadsheet or desktop database. At the same time, rights information management is no longer just a back-office overhead process: done right, it’s a way to enable new revenue opportunities through content while minimizing legal risk as well as administrative costs.
In this informative session we will explore the changes in the digital media supply chain and expose the challenges and issues around systematic rights information management. Using parallels from digital asset management, we will offer approaches to building structured rights information and show how they can add increasing value within a fragmented distribution environment. We will also note key industry initiatives illustrating the way leading media companies are approaching the issue.
What is a good taxonomy? It’s more than a clever organization of concepts and terms. A good taxonomy must make sense from a user-interface and usability perspective. This month, our speakers will drill into key user-centric factors for creating high-impact taxonomies.
John’s focus is on how our cognitive styles and temperaments radically influence the gathering and processing of information. This has implications for taxonomy and search, often in ways that are glossed over as "noise", "outliers", or "too complex to account for". Paying attention to these factors can provide the special sauce necessary for users to get value from taxonomy.
Bob will map out best practices based on real-world case studies from his large-scale search and online community projects. Representative practices include how to integrate content-consumption with content-sharing, how to invite users to take action, and how to build on user-generated rankings. Taken together, these practices keep content dynamic and engaging.
Taxonomy plays a variety of roles in today's information environments – enabling records management, search optimization, personalization and social media among other initiatives. While the role of taxonomy continues to expand, it has always been a key enabler of good navigation and UI. Good navigation is critical for getting users to the content they need.
David Roth from MISI Company will discuss Crafting and managing effective cross channel brand experiences requires adherence to some guiding principles. Those principles include having a clear understanding of the experience you are trying to create, understanding the people you are creating the experience for, aligning your company’s people and systems around the facilitation of that experience, and putting in place effective systems of governance, measurement and continuous improvement. In this webinar he will discuss the importance of adhering to these key principles and outline some basic techniques for doing so.
Special attention will then be paid to a critical component of consistent, cost-efficient management of cross channel experiences: marketing asset management.
Seth Maislin and Gordon Castle from Earley & Associates, Inc. will discuss Digital asset management and marketing asset management is becoming an essential component of cross channel marketing programs. In many organizations the responsibility for creating marketing assets is decentralized and siloed by channel. One group is working on email marketing, another on web commerce, others on social media and still other groups on more traditional print and broadcast. A centralized, taxonomy-driven repository is foundational for building capabilities of re-use and evaluation in the brand management space.
Organizations today struggle with unifying their enterprise information systems with business processes so that classifications can evolve to meet changing needs, yet remain in context of one another. In most cases, enterprise taxonomy initiatives derive from pain points in search and retrieval, but taxonomy has a much larger role to play in a variety of processes, such as business intelligence, customer relationship management, and master data management. Join us to hear Leslie Owens of Forrester discuss emerging trends in the role of taxonomy in the enterprise, and how information professionals can better leverage the taxonomy message to steer EA strategy toward achieving business objectives.
Learn how to bring together multiple existing taxonomies for unified use. Most organizations today have multiple repositories in place; a single system environment is increasingly rare. As a result, more taxonomies are being created, but these vocabularies need to be combined or merged, whether to create a unified enterprise taxonomy from those of separate departments, to bring together taxonomies resulting from acquisitions of companies or product lines, or to reconcile folksonomies with taxonomies. This session looks at three key ways that taxonomies may be combined for different purposes: integrating, merging, or mapping.
The advent of social media has organizations rushing to embrace this exciting area. However, without an effective taxonomy in place to control emerging changes in content deployment, implementation can be difficult to manage.
Taxonomy plays a critical role in user experience, but how can it manage content when access and information needs differ across a vast user base? How do you effectively offer information and resources in a meaningful way, through one portal, and to all users? This session will address how to optimize user satisfaction by leveraging taxonomy to catalog users in the same way we use taxonomies to classify knowledge assets. We will discuss how to determine and prioritize differing content needs, push dynamic content based on user profiles, and present a customized information architecture that makes it intuitive for users to target the information that best serves their unique purpose.
Managing a collection of digital image assets is a complex undertaking. Unlike text-based documents, images do not provide headings, captions, or the ability to count word frequency for delivering relevant search results. With examples from stock photo distributors and a case study on an image collection of 3.5 million, this session will address critical considerations for building effective metadata for images. We’ll discuss the particulars of image distribution systems, metadata for rights protection and topic access, and overview primary metadata standards for managing digital images.
An ontology is both a flexible and exciting way to organize information. In this session, we will discuss such issues as bridging concepts amongst taxonomy, thesauri, and ontology, the details of ontology representation in RDF/OWL, implementing ontologies within systems, and use cases for how ontologies are being used for systems integration and vocabulary mapping.
Taxonomies evolve over time and without periodic evaluation can become stale, disorganized, and structurally unsound. Bad navigation leads to bad user experiences. Your website taxonomy can also impact search engine rankings, but how do you balance SEO needs with good navigation? In this session we will discuss the value of evaluating taxonomy for improving user experience and SEO, including best practices, emerging methods, and success metrics.
Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, at lower cost. For most organizations these days, component content is achieved by using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. When you’re using DITA and other component-oriented methods, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. It’s logical that DITA users would turn to taxonomy and metadata to improve findability of their reusable content.
An enterprise search audit will determine where you need to specifically improve search processes. Based on actual user behavior and system results, a search audit will provide hard data for a baseline evaluation of search effectiveness. We’ll discuss types of search audits, approaches for gathering data and ways a search audit can pinpoint the needs for improvement in system tuning, metadata and content management processes.
In addition to presenting results around maturity levels, this call will benchmark current search, taxonomy, and metadata practices against the 2005 survey and report on some surprising key findings around information access and best practices adoption.
All aspects of portal development can benefit from taxonomy principles. Portals are used to organize, distribute and facilitate connections to information or people within an organization. This session will describe the concept, approach and tools required to apply taxonomy dynamically to create portal applications that meet user requirements.
Managing taxonomies on a global scale presents new challenges. How are terms localized and translated?Who has responsibility for changes and updates? How can differences in culture and the nuances of meaning be handled from one language and locale to another? Even subtle variations in meaning and interpretation can have far reaching implications for your taxonomy processes.
When developing a new content management system, there is always the not so trivial matter of getting your old content into the new system. How is content cleansed, organized, and prepared for migration? What are the tools that can facilitate the process? Who should handle migration and what is the overall plan of attack? What are the costs (direct and indirect) of migration? We’ll address these issues through case studies in content migration for new CMS deployments.
Auto tagging is one of those areas that has been full of promise, yet fallen short of expectations. Over the years, vendors have developed various approaches to deriving and applying metadata to content but some require more effort (such as development of large training sets) than manual tagging would. However, algorithms have gotten better and engines smarter and there are new approaches to auto tagging that we will explore.
In this session we’ll review practices around developing taxonomies as they are specifically applied to faceted search. We’ll discuss do’s and don’ts and show you how to get more from faceted search and create an intuitive user interface that will improve usability and result in increased conversions.
SharePoint can leverage taxonomies in a number of ways – through column definitions and content types, through physical organizations of libraries and through logical classification of collections. In this session, we’ll explore the ramifications of several design decisions and how to maintain consistent classifications in your SharePoint repositories. You’ll see examples of wireframes for MOSS 2007 and where taxonomies are surfaced to enhance content findability. We’ll also discuss some of the challenges and limitations of SharePoint search and how to address these in your deployments.
This presentation will explore how combining a search integration framework with a unified approach to taxonomy management can create an enterprise search platform that delivers highly relevant search results in a conversational user experience.
We’ll consider taxonomy from a holistic perspective of content and content management strategy. What does a content management strategy mean? Is it the business strategy and how business needs are supported by content? The strategy for developing content, messaging and branding? Is it the technical strategy for implementing the CMS? Taxonomy, classification and metadata have an important role supporting each of these perspectives.
This presentation will describe two methods developed for quantitatively measuring the quality of a website's search engine results using data readily available in search logs. It also takes a look at the reports you should be monitoring, and what each of them can tell you about your customer, your web site, and your company.
Both taxonomy and SEO are about semantics, keywords, terminology and metadata and about deriving intent from ambiguity. Many organizations are doing work to understand how users think about internal and external content from a taxonomy, metadata and content management perspective. Other groups are engaging agencies and SEO specialists in improving organic search rankings. However, SEO and taxonomy are not always considered from a holistic perspective.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are similar to other kinds of content management tools but present unique challenges around describing and locating content that typically lacks a great deal of narrative text. Images, video, audio clips, and other nontext assets are more challenging to describe and, given the sheer volume of content generated in day-to-day operations, difficult to locate.
When creating navigational taxonomies, we all know that no first draft will ever be perfect. Multiple users and multiple perspectives make navigational taxonomies especially difficult to construct. In this session we will talk about the value of engaging taxonomy end users in both the design and testing phases of taxonomy development.
This presentation will discuss how to improve user experience through demonstrating the power of taxonomy in e-commerce to the organization. The value of taxonomy is not often understood by decision-makers; this is problematic given that e-commerce websites are simply online catalogs that users must navigate to select products and boost conversion rates. The session will also provide examples of recent e-commerce website redesigns and five tips for overcoming organizational obstacles.
This session will cover the different set of deliverables produced in getting a taxonomy project started and how Mike Gardner worked with the repository teams to define their requirements for metadata and the types of documentation he used to do this. Also hear from Rachel Lovinger on how to represent metadata for better project communication.
So you've spent time and money developing a taxonomy; was it all worth it? How do we develop metrics and correlate taxonomy performance with realized benefits? This session opens the lines to our audience of practitioners for a roundtable session featuring questions and further discussion from attendees.
How do you explain the value of taxonomy projects in the era of "just get Google"? Taxonomy and metadata standards projects can be abstract and difficult to explain. However, unless you are able to clearly convey the value of this work it will be challenging, if not impossible, to obtain organizational support and resources. This session is a must for anyone struggling with gaining buy-in for their taxonomy and information architecture programs.
Nowhere is there a more compelling case for taxonomy & metadata than in the world of publishing. Issues of data delivery, aggregation, content reuse, and standards have been at the forefront of many e-publishers' minds. We will hear from Chris Hogue (Roundarch) on the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) and its usage. We will also hear from Mid Walsh on the use of taxonomy, indexing, and content reuse at Houghton Mifflin.
Taxonomies are a fundamental part of the semantic web: machine-readable hierarchies that enable intelligent agents to make logical inferences, making information retrieval an entirely new experience. This session will cover ways in which the semantic web can be used to enhance websites and discuss moving beyond traditional search in practical applications of the semantic web in industry and government.
What if we let users drive the taxonomy? There is a lot of dialogue and research being conducted on folksonomies - also known as social tagging. Is it effective? How can we use folksonomy in the corporate environment? This session covers recent research analyzing the practice of user tagging and discusses a project at MITRE launched to assess the the value and utility of social bookmarking on a corporate intranet.
This session will explore the role of facets in organizing and accessing content. We’ll start with an overview of faceted search and then hear from Peter Bell, one of the founders of Endeca, a faceted search company, about new developments in the field that allow a combination of unstructured and structured tagging and classification.
Dictionaries, thesauri, taxonomies and automatic categories have been part of document management systems for quite some time. Recently, tagging, folkonomies and ontologies are emerging as new ways to capture social and domain knowledge. Furthermore, using the emerging Semantic Web standards such as RDF and OWL, and technologies for automatic metadata extraction (annotation) and semantic analysis, have provided alternative or newer ways to organize, integrate and exploit (search, analyze and perform knowledge discovery) information within enterprise and on the Web.
In our global business environment, it often isn't enough to derive a taxonomy in English. Frequently, international businesses and websites now need multilingual taxonomies, or local language variations. This session will discuss strategies, solutions, and describe case studies about how to manage multi-lingual taxonomies.
A crucial but often overlooked step of the taxonomy development and maintenance process is validating the taxonomy. Taxonomy validation and testing gives you a chance to ensure that your taxonomy works as expected and gives you a chance to make important changes before scaling up for an entire project. Hear from Seth Earley and other taxonomy experts about how to test-drive your taxonomy.
Hear how taxonomy projects are essential to knowledge management initiatives, and learn how to apply thesaurus structures to improve the findability of explicit knowledge, and the ability to locate and leverage tacit expertise.
Speakers will focus on the need to define context and process, and how to apply taxonomies to effectively support KM.
Designing and implementing a practical and effective taxonomy always starts with a practical and effective set of project requirements. Whether you're developing or implementing a taxonomy, using in-house talent, or creating a vendor/consultant request for proposal (RFP), you need to clearly scope the project and identify the application framework. When you get the ball rolling with a set of well-defined goals and requirements, you'll be more likely to end up with a result that meets your expectations. In this session, our speakers will offer practical insights into the requirements development process.
Whether you like it or not, you won't be deriving your taxonomies in a vacuum. During the development process, you often have to collaborate and integrate with related projects in the enterprise, such as web design, search engine optimization, e-commerce, and enterprise architecture. So how do you keep in alignment with all these other workstreams and keep your project on plan? Our speakers in this session will cover strategies to help you achieve a smooth integration.
User Experience design is often thought of as distinct or different from taxonomy design. What are good IA practices and how do they influence taxonomy design? In this session you'll hear from three experienced IA's who will share specific examples from their organizations and consulting projects that will illustrate principles that you can apply in your taxonomy projects.
Bringing a taxonomy to life is not an easy job. Operationalization often requires juggling multiple perspectives, such as those of designers, content publishers, application developers, not to mention consumers. These groups all have different views on what taxonomy is, how it should be applied, managed, and integrated. So, knowing this, how do you roll your taxonomy to the enterprise? This session will present taxonomy operationalization strategies that take into account this multiplicity of views.
Building applications and systems to support customer processes - either self service or call center support - requires an understanding of your customer's 'intent' as well as their mental model. Terminology has to be intuitive and self evident in the case of self-service, or needs to lead the service rep down the correct path in the case of call center support.
Your company has recognized the value of classification. Now, what is involved in keeping a taxonomy project afloat and relevant? Who does what? When should it be done? Who makes decisions? This session will cover important issues in governance roles, policies, structures, and strategies.
Tagging, when part of a large complex system, can contribute to the emergence of knowledge. But tagging alone is not sufficient. Intelligence emerges between chaos and control, and the ideal balance between both is needed. This session compares formal taxonomies with social tagging, covers issues in designing tagging systems, and provides ways to get people to create better tags.
Topic maps provide a compelling application for aiding knowledge discovery of content that is related without common sets of metadata. This presentation will kick off with a thorough introduction to the origin of topic maps, including the evolution of SGML to XML. We will progress into examples of topic maps in practical use by a variety of industries and finish with a discussion on the interdependencies of topic maps, taxonomies, and OWL.
Google quietly entered the Enterprise Search market in early 2002. Analyst firms dismissed it as a tool for sophisticated environments, assigning it to the realms of inexpensive, simple, DIY search. The product line has grown since then, and has gone on the offensive in terms of marketing. New capabilities, notably the ability to integrate with Google Desktop Search for Enterprise, are renewing calls to "just get Google." Is it right for your organization?
How do we measure the value of a taxonomy? Taxonomies are often far removed from actual business processes, and if we measure an "indicator", it's difficult to link the result directly to the taxonomy. With case studies and real world examples, this session will cover a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the success and appropriateness of your taxonomy.
Building indexes and taxonomies are two sides of the same coin. Understanding each process and how they are related can yield insights that will improve the effectiveness of search and navigation. This session will discuss the implications indexing has on taxonomy development and how the two measure up for information management and tagging practices.
This session will address successfully leveraging taxonomies for integration in content management systems (CMS). We begin with an overview of the major challenges in improving CMS information architecture and move through the key factors in effectively optimizing enterprise content management with taxonomy, including technology options and examples of real world corporate and healthcare taxonomies.
How do you define Semantic Technology? This presentation addresses a number of important topics surrounding practical applications, including the impact on content management, knowledge management, and collaboration tools, how these technologies relate to taxonomies and thesauri, and short term enterprise considerations.
After you've developed a taxonomy, there is still the problem of applying terms to documents that have no metadata or are sitting on various file servers without much attention to organizing principles. There may be value in some of those documents, but the cost of reviewing them manually and indexing them is prohibitive. Since the purpose of developing a taxonomy is to improve search, we need to somehow address the issues in an efficient manner. In this session we looked at the challenges and tradeoffs of indexing large numbers of documents.
In this session we'll learn how tow large organizations deal with governance policies, and processes.
We'll hear Christine Connors of Raytheon and Marti Heyman of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu about how they deal with governance and how governance policies will vary depending on the phase of the taxonomy program (creation, implementation, maintenance) and the size of the project.
This session reviews research by Taxonomy Strategies and Earley & Associates, Inc that explores current and planned taxonomy practices at various types of organizations. We will address a number of findings, including common search practices and organizational polices around metadata, taxonomy development, and standards.
One of the goals of a taxonomy is to improve search. Some search vendors have tools that either generate taxonomies based on content or group documents into clusters based on taxonomic terms. The goal is to improve the ability to extract meaningful structure from a body of content. Search and classification tools are getting better at this... But how good are they really? What are the considerations? What works and what doesn't work?
Seth Earley kicks off the presentation with a discussion on the value of metadata, including the nuances of structural metadata used in information architecture and semantic metadata used to disambiguate meaning in semantic relationships. Also hear from Todd Stephens on integrating consumer taxonomies for classifying assets and Danette McGillivray, who introduces a framework for managing complex information environments in the enterprise.
You've created a taxonomy, now what do you do with it? How do you roll it out? How do you communicate with your various constituencies? How do you train various types of stakeholders from content creators to web site users and integrate your taxonomy into content tagging processes?
In this call you'll learn from case studies about how to best approach taxonomy projects. Topics include term gathering, term organization, testing and evaluation, etc.
Legal, regulatory and operational requirements make standard enterprise vocabularies an imperative. In this call, you'll learn how business problems, if correctly framed, can drive taxonomy projects that can then be leveraged in many areas of the organization. We will discuss taxonomy challenges with regards to Sarbanes Oxely.
One of the reasons to create a taxonomy is to improve search results. What are the ways this can be done? What are the factors that need to be considered? How do search engines leverage taxonomies? You've heard of faceted search, how can faceted search be implemented? Faceted search will leverage metadata contained in documents, but what about less structured documents? What about tuned or targeted search? How can a taxo be leveraged with search engines? (We will look specifically at Verity) In this session, we'll hear from taxo consultants, a researcher and an implementation engineer.
