SharePoint and Taxonomies – Part VI of VI

Sharepoint is a popular software and comes free with the MicroSoft Server. In fact, I think Sharepoint, more than any other thing, has excited interest in taxonomies for people. Sharepoint 2010 has a taxonomy module and although it doesn’t have everything that your heart might wish for, it is a significant step forward. A lot of people have been trying to figure out exactly how to best use their taxonomy within the Sharepoint offering. This is one option.

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Data Visualization and Term Analytics – Part V of VI

A completely different kind of use is term analytics. We have talked a lot of text analytics in the past, where people take great big full text files and they run them through a lot of Bayesian, neural net, and latent semantic indexing kind of engines to figure out how to compare things. You could do that using a taxonomy instead and still figure out the strengths of the organization; what are the strengths in the publications; what are the emerging topics in your areas. You use people’s own data to address these questions and figure out the answers.

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Authors at a Place – Part IV of VI

Continuing with our series on semantic integration, let’s discuss Authors.

You can take a list of authors by place. Identifying marks or spots represent clusters of people who have published on a particular topical area. You take the author, their subject profile, and then attach to their address, the latitude and longitude of that address, and you can put them on a map. These kinds of match-ups are pretty cool.

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Paper Submission – Empowering the Authors – Part III of VI

As we continue talking about semantic integration and more specifically, use cases; here is a different kind of use case. Somebody in this case is uploading an article (and you’ll see this again in other venues) in this case a conference paper to the American Society for Information Science and Technology site. A prospective author uploads their paper, they fill in the blanks as appropriate, and up pops a list of appropriate taxonomy terms. The author, the submitting person, can then check off the list of terms they think are appropriate to their paper. Then the paper is saved, already indexed. They will have already indexed their paper, which saves people a lot of time. In any kind of venue, folks can do their own indexing.

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Semantic Integration – Part I of VI

To discuss the semantic integration or the leveraging of a taxonomy in search, web sites mashups and other places, we should first review what they are. Let’s look at the definitions and then the integration of a taxonomy as a building block for the larger information architecture for an organization. We need to think of taxonomies in that bigger case when we are talking about where we apply them. Once those are out of the way I will review some use-cases and show what makes them work.

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Five Myths about Taxonomy and SharePoint

A couple of weeks ago there was a blog post, or repost by Jeff Carr, on the Early Site. I enjoyed reading it, and of course I have a few thoughts and places where I do not exactly agree. Let me take them on this week. There are 5 Myths. I will write about each of them separately.

Myth #1: SharePoint now has taxonomy management.

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When will it be finished?

Is it final? Finally! I recall Rex Harrison playing Pope Julius II, shouting up to Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, something like, “When will it be finished?” To which Michelangelo-Heston replied enigmatically, “When I’m done!” Michelangelo spent most of five years (1477 to 1480) on his back painting the Sistine Chapel. The Pope’s impatience was not without justification as he was financing the project while trying to recapture former Papal territories filched by the Borgias.

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What’s in a name?

Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

True, but try finding the right document set for your current project by sniffing them out from within a database of 8 million similar smelling documents. This approach is all too common, very time consuming, and unreliable leaving you with aromatic, unpalatable results.

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