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Taxonomies of Knowledge: Building a Corporate Taxonomy. Wendi Pohs, Iris Associates wendi_pohs@iris.com. Taxonomy A hierarchical collection of categories and documents Structure and content Category Name of a group of documents Thesaurus A synonym list. Definitions.
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Taxonomies of Knowledge: Building a Corporate Taxonomy Wendi Pohs, Iris Associates wendi_pohs@iris.com
Taxonomy • A hierarchical collection of categories and documents • Structure and content • Category • Name of a group of documents • Thesaurus • A synonym list Definitions
Knowledge management, 5, 13, 21, 26 • taxonomy in, 11-13 Back-of-the-book index
Clustering • Automatically generating groups of similar documents based on distance or proximity measures • Categorizing • Analyzing documents and assigning them to predefined categories Definitions
Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder, but reflecting end user needs is as critical as representing texts....and it takes work! The Mantra
Discovery: the serendipitous find • Navigation: browsing, relationships between categories • Analysis: previously unknown topics Benefits
Reuse information • Improve information quality • Make new connections • Identify affinities • Enhance full text search Benefits
Determine user information needs • Create initial taxonomy • Edit, rename categories • Create affinities • Categorize new documents • Test the UI • Train the taxonomy High Level Process
Audit information needs • Audit content • Is there an existing taxonomy? • How clean is the meta-data? • Look for existing descriptive fields • Select sources • Map to an existing business process • Get functional buy-in • Be format-agnostic, but look for lots of text Determine end user needs
Rules • Coverage: wide or deep • Number of levels • Categories per document • Documents per category • Manual versus automatic Create initial taxonomy
Editing process • Scan the entire taxonomy • Spot-check the documents in the categories • Focus on unique terms in the labels and assign new names as you go • Move documents to appropriate categories when necessary • Merge and delete redundant categories • Term approval process Edit, rename categories
Manual or automatic? • Authors, content experts, or editors? • Legacy applications? Categorize documents
Test with users • Use their UI • Can users find what they need? • Any missing categories? • Do the groups of documents make sense? • Do the categories complement full-text search? Test
Set appropriate expectations • Control the organization of information • Trust the system • Human intervention vs impartiality • Legacy controlled vocabularies • Tight integration with IT/Admin Issues