Buy, Build, Automate: Why you should Buy Your Taxonomy

1. Buy, Build, Automate: Why you should Buy Your Taxonomy Tom ReamyChief Knowledge Architect KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com

2. Buy, Build, Automate – How to Decide? • A hierarchy does not a taxonomy make. • Browse structures, categorization engines, file plans • Taxonomies are infrastructure resources, not a project • Subject matter is important • scientific standards – Mesh, etc. • Limited domain – wine, geography • What is it used for? Indexing, browsing. • How is it evaluated? Formal metrics, usability

3. Automatic taxonomies aren’t • Quality of automated taxonomies is poor. • Unusual hierarchy, uneven granularity, weird node names • Expensive software that does only one thing – and does it badly • Taxonomies are about meaning – and automatic taxonomies are about co-occurring chicken scratches. • Don’t forget the cost of the programmers to install, maintain, customize – and the upgrades! • Still need human categorizers – edit, sanity check

4. Building a taxonomy is really hard • Custom built taxonomies are the most expensive way to do it. • Who Builds? – taxonomist wannabe, consultant • Taxonomy development is not for the faint of heart – it’s hard and requires special skills • Mercy of high price consultant • Hard to maintain – user’s change, so taxonomy needs to – often! • Representing user’s thinking – but users think so badly!

5. The Solution – Buy Your Taxonomy • Formal taxonomies are fixed resource – little or no maintenance • Formal taxonomies support communication • Your content is not completely different • Formal Quality Metrics • Corpus, coverage, nomenclature, dependency • No mixed classes, noun forms, proper speciation • Bell Curve, balance of breadth and depth • Quality of taxonomy is high – teams of professionals, vetted over years with multiple customers

6. Conclusion • There is no such thing as “One size fits all” with taxonomies • Building a taxonomy is expensive, hard to do and hard to maintain • Automated algorithms don’t work with context, know the relationships between topics, or understand your business or application • Classification on top of a formal taxonomy can represent users perspective, support multiple applications, and enhance communication within and between companies

7. Questions? Tom Reamy – KAPS Group – tomr@kapsgroup.com Jim Wessely – Advanced Document Services - jwessely@adocs.com Wendi Pohs – InfoClear Consulting –wpohs@infoclearonline.com

8. Real Conclusion – all of the above • Buy a taxonomy or find taxonomic resources – for some subjects • Budget for customization • Buy software that automates some of the process, especially categorization & content management • Build taxonomies for some subjects – using software, existing taxonomies or other information structure resources • Hire professionals – don’t try this at home • Taxonomies are living, breathing, evolving structures – plan accordingly • Taxonomies are not expensive – compared with search, CM, portals – and not finding/using content