Concept Searching has released conceptClassifier for SharePoint for Perkins+Will, an integrated design firm. Providing a solution for their cataloging challenge, they provided a way to organize the information stored on its intranet. They previously had multiple taxonomies. In the end, they had a logical collection of managed metadata that allowed the information to be found in a comprehensive way.
In Part 1, we looked at maintaining a taxonomy in Excel – a set of preferred terms arranged in a hierarchy. This taxonomy structure is a handy way to organize a group of terms and can be used across an industry for benchmarking or reporting requirements (see Strategies for Incorporating Data Exchange Standards in E-Business Taxonomies advocating for the construction industry and The IFRS Taxonomy, including the labels used in the International Financial Reporting Standards). Excel works quite well to create and maintain a taxonomy, but how about a thesaurus?
Pandora is known as one of the most popular personalized radio services out there and now they have rolled out the ‘Inside the Music’ program, in partnership with Intel. The program offers users the opportunity to explore behind-the-scenes of the Pandora Music Genome Project providing them with all necessary information on their favorite music.
For a short time in the 1990s, I helped a small company develop proposals for providing mental health services. My desk housed two standard references: the Chicago Manual of Style, and the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychological Association (APA). The DSM is essentially a classification system, like a taxonomy, providing a structured list of the psychiatric diagnoses used by mental health practitioners.
Since the launch of SharePoint 2010, there are new options for taxonomies. This new version has a more evolved taxonomy management framework, a relatively robust tagging interface, and some functions to leverage the taxonomies in search and navigation.
Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in the data management industry, has collaborated with the Iowa Legislative Services Agency to build a customized thesaurus that allows the Iowa Legislature General Assembly to easily access its extensive legal body of existing and proposed laws, bills, acts, and regulations by using controlled, vocabulary-driven indexing in addition to published indexing codes.
TEMIS was chosen by Gannett for its semantic content enrichment solution better known as Luxid. Their semantic tagging and linking software as a tagging engine assists in the categorization of news articles and consistent indexing of content against a common taxonomy.
There’s been some discussion recently in the Taxonomy Community of Practice LinkedIn group about free or low cost thesaurus management software. I’ve noticed a dearth of postings about using Excel, a very popular tool, particularly if you already have a Microsoft Office license. Experts disparage Excel as a tool, but it can provide a way to start your thesaurus development. And, if you are mindful of organizing your Excel worksheet so that its data can be imported later into a dedicated tool, you can achieve some important objectives. Excel is indeed the most popular thesaurus management tool. (see Taxonomy & metadata strategies for effective content management workshop slides in which taxonomy expert Joe Busch reiterates this.)
I hope this series on search has been helpful to users and professionals alike. Let’s close with a look at taxonomies in SharePoint. Let’s look at this data flow in another way. We have incoming information; going to dump into a repository. We need to add metadata to that repository. We want to add taxonomy terms. The taxonomy terms all need to be controlled or suggested. So, there’s a backend to do that. Once we have the data in that repository it could be exported to a SQL or a relational database, transactional system, for e-commerce. It might be put into a repository so that the full displays can be done. It might be loaded into a search system and you also might have a presentation layer for display.