Sometimes I mess around with the Siri app on my iPhone, but that is the extent of that. However, I have noticed more and more of my friends actually using the talk feature on their mobile phone to search the Internet. It is their verbal Google. KMWorld put this phenomenon into perspective in their article, “Universal, federated or unified search in the land of information silos.”

The magic of this voice search boils down to a method for providing content from a relatively modest set of choices. The system does not utilize all of the information available in multiple indexes. Siri ignores some indexed information completely. For example, when you search for the closest restaurant – you don’t want a video of it, you want the address or a website.The same is true for organizations. Information access and retrieval within most organizations is still a work in progress.

How your content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.