Featured – Page 84

Calculating the ROI of Semantic Enrichment

By Melody Smith | August 23, 2010 |

We are often asked for help in calculating the potential return on investment (ROI) of investing in a taxonomy. How this calculation is done depends on the type of organization and who will be the users of the taxonomy. For any content-intensive organization, using a taxonomy increases findability, which in turn leads to greater utility and value for the organization’s content assets. Within the enterprise, this translates into hours and dollars saved by reducing the time required to find things, as well as the time and expense of redoing research or other work that can’t be found.

The Race for Relevancy: Information Foraging

By Melody Smith | August 16, 2010

The key word in Web 2.0 is relevancy. The surge in social networking sites and mobile internet means we are always connected and always feeding information into the greater whole. Easy access to relevant information is emerging as a major focus as the internet continues to be flooded with exponentially more information.

Standards: Straightjacket or Straight Edge?

By Melody Smith | August 9, 2010

Standards were not popular with would-be railroad tycoons in the 1880s. A standard set of railroad tracks eliminated some profitable loading and unloading work. Incompatible tracks kept the other guys’ rolling stock on another guy’s tracks. Eventually standards emerged because a couple of tycoons figured out how to make even more money by standardizing. Many industries go through this wide open approach only to find that over time certain methods or designs become part of the furniture of living.

Lost In Translation

By Melody Smith | August 2, 2010

Different cognitive paths are driven by the language we speak and our culture drives the way we organize and categorize information. These differences will lead us to very different discoveries and conclusions.

Field by Any Other Name

By admin | July 26, 2010 |

July 26, 2010 — In one of the chatty podcasts about software engineering, one of the commentators pointed out that metadata was one of the most critical aspects of information governance. We agree. The chatter continued and another podcast voice mentioned that there was a relationship between database field names and metadata. I realized that…

Microsoft and Its Taxonomy of Intents

By admin | July 19, 2010

July 19, 2010 — Xiaosin Yin and Sarthak Shah wrote a paper published in April 2010, “Building Taxonomy of Web Search Intents for Name Entity Queries.” We revisited this paper because Yahoo announced that it was considering a service that used popular queries for a new Yahoo news service. You can read a summary of…

Why Use A Taxonomy Management Tool?

By Melody Smith | July 12, 2010

With content management systems offering taxonomy features, why use a taxonomy managment tool at all? There are many reasons why a coordinating taxonomy management tool is not only valuable, but necessary. The system should not be short-circuited by the limitations of a content management system which, trying to serve an array of purposes, doesn’t quite match all the functions served by the original parts.

Taxonomies and Content Governance

By admin | July 5, 2010

July 5, 2010 — In the 1980s, commercial database producers had an editorial policy. I recall reading the Courier Journal / Data Courier description of the editorial policy for the original ABI/INFORM business database. (Disclosure: Access Innovations was an advisor to the Courier Journal’s commercial database operation.) The idea was that subject matter experts and…