Taxonomy DevelopmentAn Infrastructure Model

Tom ReamyChief Knowledge Architect

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com

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Agenda

Introduction Type of Taxonomies The Enterprise Context

– Making the Business Case Infrastructure Model of Taxonomy Development

– Taxonomy in 4 Contexts• Content, People, Processes, Technology

Infrastructure Solutions – the Elements Applying the Model – Practical Dimension

– Starting and Resources Conclusion

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KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services (KAPS) Consulting, strategy recommendations Knowledge architecture audits Partners – Convera, Inxight, FAST, and others Taxonomies: Enterprise, Marketing, Insurance, etc.

– Taxonomy customization Intellectual infrastructure for organizations

– Knowledge organization, technology, people and processes– Search, content management, portals, collaboration,

knowledge management, e-learning, etc.

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Two Types of Taxonomies: Browse and Formal

Browse Taxonomy – Yahoo

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Two Types of Taxonomies: Formal

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Browse Taxonomies: Strengths and Weaknesses Strengths: Browse is better than search

– Context and discovery– Browse by task, type, etc.

Weaknesses:– Mix of organization

• Catalogs, alphabetical listings, inventories• Subject matter, functional, publisher,

document type– Vocabulary and nomenclature Issues– Problems with maintenance, new material– Poor granularity and little relationship

between parts.• Web site unit of organization

– No foundation for standards

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Formal Taxonomies: Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:– Fixed Resource – little or no maintenance– Communication Platform – share ideas, standards– Infrastructure Resource

• Controlled vocabulary and keywords

• More depth, finer granularity

Weaknesses:– Difficult to develop and customize– Don’t reflect users’ perspectives

• Users have to adapt to language

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Facets and Dynamic Classification

Facets are not categories– Entities or concepts belong to a category– Entities have facets

Facets are metadata - properties or attributes– Entities or concepts fit into one category– All entities have all facets – defined by set of values

Facets are orthogonal – mutually exclusive – dimensions– An event is not a person is not a document is not a place.

Facets – variety – of units, of structure– Date or price – numerical range– Location – big to small (partonomy)– Winery – alphabetical– Hierarchical - taxonomic

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Faceted Navigation: Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:– More intuitive – easy to guess what is behind each door

• 20 questions – we know and use– Dynamic selection of categories

• Allow multiple perspectives– Trick Users into “using” Advanced Search

• wine where color = red, price = x-y, etc.. Weaknesses:

– Difficulty of expressing complex relationships • Simplicity of internal organization

– Loss of Browse Context• Difficult to grasp scope and relationships

– Limited Domain Applicability – type and size• Entities not concepts, documents, web sites

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Dynamic Classification / Faceted navigation Search and browse better than either alone

– Categorized search – context– Browse as an advanced search

Dynamic search and browse is best– Can’t predict all the ways people think

• Advanced cognitive differences• Panda, Monkey, Banana

– Can’t predict all the questions and activities• Intersections of what users are looking for

and what documents are often about• China and Biotech• Economics and Regulatory

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Business Case for Taxonomies:The Right Context Traditional Metrics

– Time Savings – 22 minutes per user per day = $1Mil a Year– Apply to your organization – customer service, content

creation, knowledge industry– Cost of not-finding = re-creating content

Research– Advantages of Browsing – Marti Hearst, Chen and Dumais– Nielsen – “Poor classification costs a 10,000 user

organization $10M each year – about $1,000 per employee.” Stories

– Pain points, success and failure – in your corporate language

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Business Case for Taxonomies:IDC White Paper Information Tasks

– Email – 14.5 hours a week– Create documents – 13.3 hours a week– Search – 9.5 hours a week– Gather information for documents – 8.3 hours a week– Find and organize documents – 6.8 hours a week

Gartner: “Business spend an estimated $750 Billion annually seeking information necessary to do their job. 30-40% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent managing documents.”

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Business Case for Taxonomies:IDC White Paper Time Wasted

– Reformat information - $5.7 million per 1,000 per year (400M)– Not finding information - $5.3 million per 1,000 (370M)– Recreating content - $4.5 Million per 1,000 (315M)

Small Percent Gain = large savings– 1% - $10 million– 5% - $50 million– 10% - $100 million

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Business Case for Taxonomies:The Right Context Justification

– Search Engine - $500K-$2Mil– Content Management - $500K-$2Mil– Portal - $500-$2Mil– Plus maintenance and employee costs

Taxonomy– Small comparative cost– Needed to get full value from all the above

ROI – asking the wrong question– What is ROI for having an HR department?– What is ROI for organizing your company?

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Infrastructure Model of Taxonomy DevelopmentTaxonomy in Basic 4 Contexts Ideas – Content Structure

– Language and Mind of your organization– Applications - exchange meaning, not data

People – Company Structure– Communities, Users, Central Team

Activities – Business processes and procedures– Central team - establish standards, facilitate

Technology / Things– CMS, Search, portals, taxonomy tools– Applications – BI, CI, Text Mining

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Taxonomy in ContextStructuring Content All kinds of content and Content Structures

– Structured and unstructured, Internet and desktop

Metadata standards – Dublin core+– Keywords - poor performance – Need controlled vocabulary, taxonomies, semantic network

Other Metadata – Document Type

• Form, policy, how-to, etc.– Audience

• Role, function, expertise, information behaviors– Best bets metadata

Facets – entities and ideas– Wine.com

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Taxonomy in Context:Structuring People

Individual People– Tacit knowledge, information behaviors– Advanced personalization – category priority

• Sales – forms ---- New Account Form

• Accountant ---- New Accounts ---- Forms

Communities– Variety of types – map of formal and informal– Variety of subject matter – vaccines, research, scuba– Variety of communication channels and information behaviors– Community-specific vocabularies, need for inter-community

communication (Cortical organization model)

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Taxonomy in Context:Structuring Processes and Technology Technology: infrastructure and applications

– Enterprise platforms: from creation to retrieval to application– Taxonomy as the computer network

• Applications – integrated meaning, not just data

Creation – content management, innovation, communities of practice (CoPs)

– When, who, how, and how much structure to add– Workflow with meaning, distributed subject matter experts (SMEs)

and centralized teams

Retrieval – standalone and embedded in applications and business processes

– Portals, collaboration, text mining, business intelligence, CRM

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Taxonomy in Context: The Integrating Infrastructure Starting point: knowledge architecture audit, K-Map

– Social network analysis, information behaviors People – knowledge architecture team

– Infrastructure activities – taxonomies, analytics, best bets– Facilitation – knowledge transfer, partner with SMEs

“Taxonomies” of content, people, and activities– Dynamic Dimension – complexity not chaos– Analytics based on concepts, information behaviors

Taxonomy as part of a foundation, not a project– In an Infrastructure Context

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Taxonomy in Context: The Integrating Infrastructure Integrated Enterprise requires both an infrastructure team and

distributed expertise.– Software and SME’s is not the answer - keywords

Taxonomies not stand alone– Metadata, controlled vocabularies, synonyms, etc.– Variety of taxonomies, plus categorization, classification, etc.

• Important to know the differences, when to use which

Multiple Applications– Search, browse, content management, portals, BI & CI, etc.

Infrastructure as Operating System– Word vs. Word Perfect– Instead of sharing clipboard, share information and knowledge.

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Infrastructure Solutions: The start and foundationKnowledge Architecture Audit Knowledge Map - Understand what you have, what you

are, what you want– The foundation of the foundation

Contextual interviews, content analysis, surveys, focus groups, ethnographic studies

Category modeling – “Intertwingledness” -learning new categories influenced by other, related categories

Natural level categories mapped to communities, activities• Novice prefer higher levels• Balance of informative and distinctiveness

Living, breathing, evolving foundation is the goal

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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesPeople and Processes: Roles and Functions Knowledge Architect and learning object designers Knowledge engineers and cognitive anthropologists Knowledge facilitators and trainers and librarians Part Time

– Librarians and information architects– Corporate communication editors and writers

Partners– IT, web developers, applications programmers– Business analysts and project managers

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Infrastructure Solutions: Resources People and Processes: Central Team

Central Team supported by software and offering services– Creating, acquiring, evaluating taxonomies, metadata standards,

vocabularies– Input into technology decisions and design – content management,

portals, search– Socializing the benefits of metadata, creating a content culture– Evaluating metadata quality, facilitating author metadata– Analyzing the results of using metadata, how communities are using– Research metadata theory, user centric metadata – Design content value structure – more nuanced than good / poor

content.

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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesPeople and Processes: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer Need for Facilitators

– Amazon hiring humans to refine recommendations– Google – humans answering queries

Facilitate projects, KM project teams– Facilitate knowledge capture in meetings, best practices

Answering online questions, facilitating online discussions, networking within a community

Design and run KM forums, education and innovation fairs Work with content experts to develop training, incorporate

intelligence into applications Support innovation, knowledge creation in communities

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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesPeople and Processes: Location of Team

KM/KA Dept. – Cross Organizational, Interdisciplinary Balance of dedicated and virtual, partners

– Library, Training, IT, HR, Corporate Communication

Balance of central and distributed Industry variation

– Pharmaceutical – dedicated department, major place in the organization

– Insurance – Small central group with partners– Beans – a librarian and part time functions

Which design – knowledge architecture audit

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Infrastructure Solutions: ResourcesTechnology

Taxonomy Management – Text and Visualization

Entity and Fact Extraction Text Mining Search for professionals

– Different needs, different interfaces

Integration Platform technology– Enterprise Content Management

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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesStage One – How to Begin Step One: Strategic Questions – why, what value from the

taxonomy, how are you going to use it– Variety of taxonomies – important to know the differences, when to

use what. Step Two: Get a good taxonomist! (or learn)

– Library Science+ Cognitive Science + Cognitive Anthropology Step Three: Software Shopping

– Automatic Software – Fun Diversion for a rainy day• Uneven hierarchy, strange node names, weird clusters

– Taxonomy Management, Entity Extraction, Visualization Step Four: Get a good taxonomy!

– Glossary, Index, Pull from multiple sources– Get a good document collection

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Infrastructure Solutions: Taxonomy DevelopmentStage Two: Taxonomy Model

Enterprise Taxonomy– No single subject matter taxonomy – Need an ontology of facets or domains

Standards and Customization– Balance of corporate communication and departmental specifics– At what level are differences represented?– Customize pre-defined taxonomy – additional structure, add

synonyms and acronyms and vocabulary

Enterprise Facet Model:– Actors, Events, Functions, Locations, Objects, Information

Resources– Combine and map to subject domains

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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesStage Three: Development and/or Customization Combination of top down and bottom up (and Essences)

– Top: Design an ontology, facet selection – Bottom: Vocabulary extraction – documents, search logs,

interview authors and users– Develop essential examples (Prototypes)

• Most Intuitive Level – genus (oak, maple, rabbit)• Quintessential Chair – all the essential characteristics, no more

– Work toward the prototype and out and up and down– Repeat until dizzy or done

Map the taxonomy to communities and activities– Category differences– Vocabulary differences

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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesStage Four: Evaluate and Refine

Formal Evaluation– Quality of corpus – size, homogeneity, representative– Breadth of coverage – main ideas, outlier ideas (see next)– Structure – balance of depth and width– Kill the verbs– Evaluate speciation steps – understandable and systematic

• Person – Unwelcome person – Unpleasant person - Selfish person

– Avoid binary levels, duplication of contrasts– Primary and secondary education, public and private

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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesStage Four: Evaluate and Refine

Practical Evaluation– Test in real life application– Select representative users and documents– Test node labels with Subject Matter Experts

• Balance of making sense and jargon

– Test with representative key concepts– Test for un-representative strange little concepts that only

mean something to a few people but the people and ideas are key and are normally impossible to find

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Sources

Books– Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

• What Categories Reveal about the Mind• George Lakoff

– The Geography of Thought• Richard E. Nisbett

Software– Convera Retrievalware– Inxight Smart Discovery – entity and fact extraction

Courses– Convera Taxonomy Certification

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Conclusion

Taxonomy development is not just a project– It has no beginning and no end

Taxonomy development is not an end in itself– It enables the accomplishment of many ends

Taxonomy development is not just about search or browse– It is about language, cognition, and applied intelligence

Strategic Vision (articulated by K Map) is important – Even for your under the radar vocabulary project

Paying attention to theory is practical– So is adapting your language to business speak

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Conclusion

Taxonomies are part of your intellectual infrastructure– Roads, transportation systems not cars or types of cars

Taxonomies are part of creating smart organizations– Self aware, capable of learning and evolving

Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast If we really are in a knowledge economy We need to pay attention to – Knowledge!

Questions?

Tom Reamytomr@kapsgroup.com

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com