Using Taxonomies Effectively in the Organization v. 2.0

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Using Taxonomies Effectively in the Organization
v. 2.0

• KnowledgeNets 2001
• Vivian Bliss
• Microsoft Knowledge Network Group
• vbliss_at_microsoft.com

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Roadmap

• What are taxonomies?
• Where do taxonomies fit?
• What are taxonomies good for?
• How do you build them?
• How do you use them?
• Future directions

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What are Taxonomies?

• Taxonomy a classification of elements within a
  domain
• Domain a sphere of knowledge, influence, or
  activity
• Classification the operation of grouping
  elements and establishing relationships between
  them (or the product of that operation)
• Relationships a defined linkage between two
  elements
• Element an object or concept

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Where do Taxonomies Fit?
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What are Taxonomies Good For?

• Taxonomies are applied to
• Items (aka resources) individual pieces of
  information (documents, people, etc)
• By the use of
• Metadata (aka properties, attributes)
  information describing types of data.
• Which may or may not use values from a
• Vocabulary selection of terms, classified or
  sorted
• To create
• Content an item and its associated metadata

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How Do You Build Taxonomies?

• Determine scope of project
• Boundaries will determine resources needed
• Breadth and depth are both important dimensions
• Obtain resource commitments
• Project will require both high and low level
  support
• If cross-organizational, even more critical

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First Steps

• User needs survey to understand
• The content your users need to do their work
• The ways your users access that conten
• The context(s) in which your users function
• Information audit to determine
• Where your existing content is
• How that content is structured
• Who is responsible for the content

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Sample Survey Questions
MSWeb Redesign Information Goals/User Assessment
Sheet 1.        List the top five most important
information services/or products under your area
that you think most employees need to know about?
What is the business impact of employees not
being aware of this information? 2.        Are
there additional services and/or
information/products within your area that would
benefit from increased exposure? Describe the
potential business value from employees having a
better awareness or understanding of this
information. 3.        What types of
content/information do you think is missing from
MSWeb? Why is it important that this.
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Sample Tag Audit
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Next Steps

• Involve your users
• Include key stakeholders in process
• Validate direction with content owners and users
• Decide on architectural approach
• Dependent on purpose of project
• Complexity will depend on needs

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The Process

• Identify
• business
• needs
• _______
• User
• needs
• survey
• Tag
• audit
• Content
• audit

• Collect/
• structure
• terms
• ________
• Build
• vocabs
• Define
• rules
• Create
• change
• control
• process

• Tag
• content
• ________
• Embed
• vocab
• access
• in tools
• Provide
• guidelines
• for use

• Expose
• Content
• ________
• Embed
• tags in
• interfaces
• Segment
• content by
• attributes
• Enable
• thru
• XML/XSL

• Define
• needed
• attributes
• _______
• Build
• object
• model
• Create
• flat list
• Provide
• mapping
• schema?

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How do You Use Taxonomies?

• Classes of Taxonomies
• Content focused/user focused
• Global and local
• -------
• Content creation- tagging
• Site navigation- categories
• Information retrieval- search
• Personalization- delivery

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Content Creation

• Tagging of documents, URLs, other items is
  critical for improved retrieval
• Two examples
• MSWeb Best Bets database- catalog of URLs used in
  search and categories
• News publishing tool- used for tagging external
  and internal news for portal display

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Site Navigation

• Much of a portals navigation centers around
  organization of information through categories
• Categories can be considered a site-specific or
  local vocabulary, used to tag URLs
• MSWeb uses taxonomy management tools for this
  purpose

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MSWeb Categories
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Category subpage
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MSWeb Search
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Results
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Future directions

• Additional groups inside the company leveraging
  taxonomies and processes for internal AND
  external use.
• 2nd generation taxonomy management tool being
  built
• -translating terms into multiple languages
• -sharp focus on relationships between terms
  allowing more creative query expansion both
  automatic and interactive
• KNG responsible for managing global taxonomies,
  various groups responsible for their own local
  taxonomies with everyone using the same tool.
• Continue investigating personalization.

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Questions? v. 2.0

• Vivian Bliss
• vbliss_at_microsoft.com
• v. 1.0 KMWorld 2000 Mike Crandall

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Taxonomies in Search
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Key Success Factors

• Define in terms of business value
• authority, relevance, timeliness, impact
• Include metrics to prove success
• Balance between control and collaboration
• Meet key stakeholder criteria on costs to build,
  costs to maintain
• Take usability/user behavior seriously
• Manage expectations all round

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Challenges

• Finding common ground across multiple taxonomies
  or schemas with similar terms and different
  meanings
• Overkillbuilding relationships where they arent
  practical given severe human resource constraints
• Ensuring the ongoing integrity of the taxonomy
• Acceptance by authors of tagging tools
• Application across object types, storage devices,
  languages, context
• Integration with legacy systems and external
  content

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Conflicts in Using Taxonomies

• Flexibility versus stability
• Costs versus resource commitments
• Focus versus breadth of scope
• Localization versus globalization
• Speed versus thoroughness

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Personalization

• The last step in linking content to people
• Requires well tagged content, and the ability to
  capture a user profile
• Current directions for MSWeb are to take
  advantage of Active Directory profiles, based on
  values pulled from common taxonomy
• Still in beginning stages