Tom Reamy is, to many of us, one of the authorities on taxonomies. He’s talking right now about the varieties of taxonomy/text analystics software available now, and how to choose which is best for your application & organization.   All the vendors are adding more text analytics. So…step number one is: how are you going to use the technology?  Text mining? business inteligence? cusomter intelligence? tfor facted navigation? keyword indexing? to browse the front end of the portal?

Evaluating Taxonomy Software:

• new, copy, rename, delee, merge
• scop notes
• spell check
• search
• names & identifiers
• versioning
• ease of use
• user documentation
• visualiztion — how does it show things?
• automatic taxonomy/node generation — Tom says it’s nonsense but can be used at different stages, especially to get suggestions within a node or for entity extraction
• entity extraction
• auto-catgorization (training sets, terms, rules, advanced - saved search queries) “near” sentence” “paragraph”
• boolean search that allows you to search for x near y, and “not”
• advanced features — sentiment analysis (for customer service to see what people are saying about them); facts, ontologies, semantic web, etc…..

Phew!  If you want taxonomy management only, you are probably in a small company with a specialized taxonomy - and the good news is that this type of software is quite affordable. But do check the upgrade path for this type of tool, just in case you need to grow the application.Advanced application platforms, sich as Attensity’s or Inxight’s, are for those appls that need to integrate search and content management or to integrate policy, procedures and distributed contributions.

Tom’s advice: forget score cards to evaluate & do a pilot project instead  — use yoru content, in your application to see HOW the tool really works— “think big, start small & win”

The “C” level problem — is that someone at the CEO, CFO, COO level has to approve this, & they won’t know a thing about it; all you can do is demonstrate the complexity in their language — tell them stories of the pain they recognize in the organization.

Key ingredient to evaluating:

• start with your own self knowledge - understand your content as much as you can, the technology already in place, and the business & information behaviours of the people that will be using the applications
• eliminate the unfit according to the list above — ask experts, look at reputation of vendors, make sure the tool matches your scope & your environment — narrow it to 3-4 vendors, bring them in, have them do demos with your content, have them all in on one day
• deep pilot — how well does it work with the semantics? this gives you a much better handle on making the decision between your top 2 vendors

A few months agoTheresa Regli of CMS Watch wrote a blogpost on whether taxonomies are dead or dying, or just hitting their stride. I thought this was a great question to address at the beginning of the Taxonomy BootCamp, and Theresa very kindly agreed to speak to the topic at 8:00 a.m. — & the audience was full. Wow.  The upshot is that Theresa feels taxonomies aren’t dying, but they are definitely being augmented by technologies, and, in some cases, aren’t necessary. As Theresa said, we need to have the confidence to admit when taxonomies aren’t required. And that is part of a process’ and a function’s maturation.

Theresa’s wit and fantastic speaking ability took this topic to new levels. She built on Seth Earley’s comment that taxonomies have a few mullets to deal with - or, preferably get rid of (mullets should definitely be eliminated!) Bob Boiko told Theresa that enterprise taxonomies are mullets that need to go; taxonomies with too great a scope are too difficult to manage & not useful —- taxonomies need to be targetted and focused.  Seth says the mullets are site maps, really deep hierarchies & huge manual tagging projects.  Theresa’s mullet is the notion that one classification fits all.

So what’s the new lifeblood of taxonomies?

• Application integration
• breaking huge corpuses of content into manageable pieces
• linguisitcs, context, purpose
• metadata for dynamic navigation & filtered searches
• taxonomists who say “technology is our friend”

Stay tuned — lots more to come…..