Taxonomy Development An Infrastructure Model

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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
FormalBrowse 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
• Dont 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
• Cant predict all the ways people think
• Advanced cognitive differences
• Panda, Monkey, Banana
• Cant 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 TaxonomiesThe 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 TaxonomiesIDC 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 workers
  time is spent managing documents.

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Business Case for TaxonomiesIDC 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 TaxonomiesThe 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 ContextStructuring 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 ContextStructuring 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 SMEs 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!

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Questions?

• Tom Reamytomr_at_kapsgroup.com
• KAPS Group
• Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
• http//www.kapsgroup.com