Taxonomy and Knowledge Organization

Taxonomy in ContextTom Reamy

Chief Knowledge Architect

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com

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Agenda

Introduction: Time for Taxonomies Taxonomy Types: Strengths and Weaknesses

– Formal and Browse

Taxonomy in the Organization: Intellectual Infrastructure– Content, People, Activities

Taxonomy Tips and Techniques– Development Stages– Issues and Ideas

Future Directions– Building on the Intellectual Infrastructure

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KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services (KAPS) Consulting, strategy recommendations Knowledge architecture audits Partners – Convera and others

– First Convera Certified Taxonomy Developers 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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Time for Taxonomies

Taxonomy Time: Technology is not delivering– Professionals spend more time looking for information than

using it– 50% of them spend > 2 hours a day looking

Search not enough – text strings vs. concepts– Relevance isn’t very relevant

Data mining misses 80% of significant content– Text mining needs more structure (taxonomies)

Surveys– 76% say taxonomies are important– 90% plan on a taxonomy strategy in 24 months

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Time for Taxonomies: Word of Caution

Taxonomy is not the answer– Is this a taxonomy?

• Inventories, catalogs, classifications, categorization schemas, thesauri, controlled vocabularies

– Taxonomy not enough – need other structures• Metadata, facets

– Taxonomies have to be used to be useful How to fail:

– Taxonomy as a project– Taxonomy as a search engine project afterthought

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Two Types of Taxonomies: Browse and Formal

Browse Taxonomy – Yahoo

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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– Don’t reflect users’ perspectives

• Users have to adapt to language

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Dynamic Classification: Best of Both Worlds Search and browse better than either alone

– Categorized search – context– Browse as an advanced search

Dynamic search and browse is best– Can’t predict all the ways people think

• Advanced cognitive differences• Panda, Monkey, Banana

– Can’t 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

Facet Taxonomies– Actors, events, functions, geography

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Taxonomy in Context: Intellectual Infrastructure

3 infrastructures: technology, organizational, intellectual– Technology – systems and applications, servers and

desktops, programmers and help desks, etc.– Organizational – business units and project groups, policies

and procedures, administrators and facilitators– Intellectual – Information and knowledge, vocabularies and

applications, authors and editors and librarians Taxonomy at the nexus of the three infrastructures Taxonomy enables communication among people, content,

and technology

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Taxonomy in the Organization: Project Approach or Infrastructure Approach Situation: Problem with access to information

– Project Approach• Publish everything on the intranet• Buy a search engine• Do some keyword and usability tests• Buy a portal (or two)• Buy content management software• Try knowledge organization – taxonomy?

– Infrastructure Approach• “The path up and down is one and the same.”

(Heraclitus)

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Taxonomy in the Organization:Why an Infrastructure Approach?

Immanuel Kant– “Concepts without percepts are empty.”– “Percepts without concepts are blind.”

Knowledge Management (KM) / Information Projects

– KM without applications is empty• Strategy only, management fad• Elegant taxonomies – unused

Applications without knowledge architecture (KA) are blind

– IT based KM– Fragmented applications

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Taxonomy in the Organization: Structuring Content

All kinds of content– Structured and unstructured, Internet and desktop

Metadata standards – Dublin core+– Keywords - poor performance – Need controlled vocabulary, taxonomies, semantic network

Document Type– Form, policy, how-to, etc.– Dynamic classification with subject matter taxonomies

Audience– Role, function, expertise, information behaviors– Consistent across subject matter and people

Best bets metadata

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Taxonomy in the Organization:Structuring 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 the Organization:Structuring 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 the Organization: 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 is the answer– In an Infrastructure Context

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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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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesStage Two: 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

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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesStage Three: 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 Three: 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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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesIssues and Ideas

Complex Topics – intersection of subject domains and facets

– What documents are often about is the intersection– Example – China and Biotech

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

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Taxonomy Development: Tips and TechniquesIssues and Ideas

Enterprise Taxonomy– No single subject matter taxonomy – Need an ontology of facets or domains

Enterprise Facet Model:– Actors, Events, Functions, Locations, Objects, Information

Resources– Combine and map to subject domains

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Future Directions: Knowledge Organization

New analytic methods– Cognitive anthropology, history of ideas, ESNA

New metadata schemas– SCORM, RDF and semantic Web– Learning and knowledge objects

New people models– Bloom’s Taxonomy, Gardner’s 7 Intelligences

Advanced personalization– Community-based, cognitive-based– Adaptive, dynamic presentation variations

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Future Directions: Technology

Taxonomies within applications– Richer world knowledge and better learning

Entity extraction and fact extraction Natural language processing (NLP) search – answers, not

document lists Integrated KM platform

– Creation, structure, retrieval, application, measurement– Integrated KM/KA team– Contextualizing content: related content, best bets, expertise,

communities

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Future Directions: Well-Articulated Organization

Learning takes place throughout the system– Smart applications – adapts to users’ and community’s

activities – Just-in-time training and performance support

Combination of analytics and knowledge organization– Concept-level, not document-level– Taxonomy is the brain, analytics are the eyes

Self-knowledge – highest form of knowledge– “Unexamined life is not worth living.” (Plato)– Unexamined, inarticulate enterprise is not worth having

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The Contextual Desktop: Document, List of Documents, Applications Screen

Before you view:– Agent keeps you up to date– Your connections to content and

communities, your preferences– Your history and the history of other

members of your communities

When you add/change content– Suggests categorization value,

metadata values– Routes to appropriate content and

communities– Prompt on unusual connections

• Pre-existing content• Related content• Regulatory issues• Ask the question – route to experts?

When you look for information– Taxonomy-based dynamic browse– Entities

• People, companies, wells– Related content

• Regulatory, patents, BI-CI• Geological data• News stories

– Dictionaries, USGS data, databases– Experts

• Ask questions, chat When you use information

– Communities• Search, chat, email

– Performance aids, classes– Stories

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Sources

Books– Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

• What Categories Reveal about the Mind• Geroge Lakoff

– The Geography of Thought• Richard E. Nisbett

Software– Convera Retrievalware– Inxight Smart Discovery – entity and fact extraction

Courses– Convera Taxonomy Certification

Questions?

Tom Reamytomr@kapsgroup.com

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com