The Ins

1
The Ins Outs of a taxonomy design project

• Andrew Young, Factiva
• Dr. Sean Slattery, APR SmartLogik

2
Taxonomists favourite joke
3
Traditional Meaning
taxonomy the scientific naming of organisms and
their classification based on evolutionary relatio
nships
Greek roots taxis meaning arrangement onoma
Meaning name
4
Lost in the supermarket?
5
Navigate the aisles and shelves

• Drinks
• Beer, Cider Alcopops
• Hot Drinks
• Soft Drinks
• Spirits
• Wines
• Champagne Sparkling Wine
• Champagne
• Bollinger
• Lanson
• Laurent Perrier
• Moet Chandon
• Tattinger
• Tesco
• New World Sparkling
• Old World Sparkling
• Red Wine
• White Wine

6
Information Taxonomies
taxonomy a hierarchical topic structure
(arrangement) and corresponding labels (names),
to which content can be assigned, thereby aiding
users in locating relevant information
7
The perfect taxonomy?

• Factiva Taxonomy
• 320,000 companies
• 780 industries
• 450 news subjects
• 370 regions
• 22 languages

8
Project Overview

• Apply Factivas taxonomy development expertise in
  conjunction with taxonomy management software and
  specialist experience from APR SmartLogik to
  design and display an outline taxonomy and
  controlled vocabulary structure for a government
  department. The outline structure to be
  accompanied by a roadmap for full enterprise-wide
  taxonomy implementation.

• Discover
• Needs Assessment
• Top Down (Stakeholders)
• Bottom Up (Content)
• Taxonomy Benchmarks
• Workshop
• Validation

• Design
• Top-level Build
• Visualisation
• Documentation

• Recommend
• Implementation Roadmap
• Best Practice
• Advice
• Estimates

9
Joined up govt. from Accrington to Accra

• Empowering staff throughout the network to share
  information and enhance the knowledge we offer to
  assist exporters and investors to a successful
  conclusion
• Compliant with government standards
• e-GMS e-GIF
• GCL
• Building on work already underway in the
  government department
• Part of the Business Information Management
  project
• Maximising the value of research business
  information

10
Business Drivers Identified

• Deliver accurate and relevant information in a
  more timely fashion
• Drive usage on extranet portal
• assist user migration to portal
• Leverage the synergies between departments
• Facilitate more self-service
• Retain information currently lost due to staff
  turnover
• Break down silos and encourage a
  knowledge-sharing culture
• by agreeing a common information architecture and
  language
• Integrate external information resources

11
Benefits of deploying a taxonomy solution

• A framework for information sharing
• Improved standard search
• Thesaurus enhanced search
• Advanced search functionality
• Contextual search/Parametric search
• Browsable directory
• Standardised terminology
• Personalisation
• A structure around which to aggregate external
  information

12
Taxonomy Design Good Practice

• Other is not good
• Inclusive hierarchy
• Poly-hierarchy in moderation
• Enrich with synonyms
• User needs should take precedence over content
  clusters
• Get to the first cut as quickly as possible
• Perfect taxonomy does not exist!
• Test in both front end and back end
• User Acceptance
• Categorisation trials

13
Where taxonomy fits in
End Users
DMS
Search E
Taxonomy
Categorizer
U Interface
Content
14
APR Smartlogik Taxonomy Manager
15
Preferred Terms
16
Enhanced Search
17
Synonyms
18
Automatic Classification
Synonyms
Automatic Content Tagger
Tag
Tag
Tag
Tag
Tagged Content
Untagged Content
19
Ongoing Maintenance
20
Assisted Design
21
Next Steps

• Content Audit
• Ownership/Staffing
• Software Selection
• Visualisation
• Technical integration
• Categorisation/Tagging
• User Adoption
• Knowledge Transfer