Innovation in Search?

Tom ReamyChief Knowledge Architect

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com

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Agenda Introduction

– 2.0 themes

Semantic Structures– Taxonomies, Facets, Facts

Social Structures– Folksonomies, Communities, Central Committees

Future Trends– Visualization, Semantics

Conclusions

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2.0 Themes

“It’s MySpace meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets Google – on steroids.”

“It’s ignorance meets egotism meets bad taste meets mob rule – on steroids.” – The Cult of the Amateur – Andrew Keen

Web 2.0 Evolution not Revolution Importance of Structure and Environment

– Wikipedia – added 2,000 editors, not a crowd Wisdom of Crowds

– Great for guessing jelly beans, not for useful tags– Tyranny and Inertia of Majority

Two Themes: Social and Semantic Search

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Semantic Structures

New content and variety of content– Blogs, videos, specialty sources

New complex (not complicated) search interfaces– Visualization – sliders and networks and time walls and …

• Beyond tag clouds = bad tags– Mashups (an unfortunate term)

• Can navigate to bomb making in Sudan• Can navigate to terrorism in Africa

– Multiple avenues for better findability and support social variety• Monkey, Panda, Banana

Software generated metadata– Automatic categorization & entity extraction

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Semantic Structures: Facets, Taxonomies and Ontologies Facets are:

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

– Intuitive, easier to develop and maintain– Variety – of units, of structure

• Numerical range, Location, Alphabetical, Hierarchical - taxonomic

Faceted Navigation is an active interface – dynamic combination of search and browse- dialogue

– Facets are multidimensional filters Taxonomy/Ontology – richer knowledge representation,

complex relationships and context, multi-purpose assets

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Facets and Taxonomies Example – Taxonomy, 7 facets – search, browse, faceted

Taxonomy of Subjects / Disciplines:– Science > Marine Science > Marine microbiology > Marine toxins

Facets:– Organization > Division > Group– Clients > Federal > EPA– Instruments > Environmental Testing > Ocean Analysis > Vehicle– Facilities > Division > Location > Building X– Methods > Social > Population Study– Materials > Compounds > Chemicals– Content Type – Knowledge Asset > Proposals

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Facets and Taxonomies: Future Trends

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Social Structures: Folksonomies, Communities and Committees Folksonomies – keywords with social mechanism

– Easy to tag, hard to find, hard to improve Research formal and informal communities

– Information behaviors, subjects, activities– KA Audit, Social Network Analysis

Discover communities– Use traditional methods (logs, other metrics)– Add folksonomies and blog categorization

New relationship of central (KM, IT, CM, etc) and communities– More sophisticated support, more freedom, more user input– New roles – users (publishing and tagging), central – create

feedback system, tweak the evolution of the system, develop initial structures

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Innovation in Search: Conclusions

Two themes – often in uneasy tension: Social and Semantics More structure! More structure! More Structure!

– Semantic – facets, taxonomies, ontologies– Social – well defined and understood communities– Metadata everywhere

How Search engine companies implement facets will be an important differentiator – built in or tacked on

– Beware of facets as parametric search New Displays –

– CM – incorporate tag clouds and more advanced representations into user interface

– Search – multiple avenues to content to support multiple minds

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Innovation in Search: Conclusions

Look to Internet for ideas and enthusiasm Look to enterprise for substantial value and breakthroughs Semantics is really, really hard – remember AI? Semantic Software is fundamental

– Semi-automating tagging, build facets, categorize results

Semantic platform for search, search as platform– Text mining, targeted alerts, etc.

Let a 1,000 Blossoms Bloom– Social and Semantics combined – Top-down, bottom-up, prototypes and basic level categories

Questions?

Tom Reamytomr@kapsgroup.com

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com