Taxonomy Watch

AIIM in Montreal

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:03 GMT

AIIM will be in Montreal on February 21, 2012 to present in French a session on Design and Implemention of Taxonomies. Presenter is Julie Nadeau. More information and registration at

On Organizing Content with Tags

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:20 GMT

Thom Johnson at I'd Rather be Writing has been writing a series of posts on findability - or more precisely - organizing content. There are 50 entries since 2010. It's eclectic - simulation, navigation, faceted - and much more. One one Using Tags to Increase Findability explores the value of tags as metadata. He draws from a book by Gene Smith - Tagging, People Powered Metadata for the Social Web.

Digital Workplace

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:38 GMT

This post in the VIP LiveWire forum - Can search replace "the perfect secretary"? - alerts us to a growing problem in organizations - that of making decisions based on data. It leads to two major studies: a survey on unstructured data, and one on the digital workplace.

The Swiss-based Infocentric Research published The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age. Its director of research, Stephan Schillerwein, observed that "Searching can take up to two hours of each working day".

Solutions are needed. The Infocentric Research whitepaper on the digital workplace and information management might help.

Introduction to classification

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:46 GMT

A Brief History of Classification by Christine Connors, TriviumRLG LLC (Jan 10)

Humans have been classifying for as long as they have used a written language. One of the earliest examples is Pinakes at the Library of Alexandra. This short history takes us up to Ranganathan's Colon Classification in the 1900s, and observes that the first enterprise use was by publishers of indexes. On the web we have seen the classification structures of the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory Project. Today, "Pattern matching is the basis for much of what occurs in these systems for rules based categorization."

Improving enterprise search

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:53 GMT

Huge problems for search in the enterprise Pandia, Dec 18, 2011

Enterprise search is not web search. It involves searching across disparate database. This article has some data on how bad search is - "some employees spend up to two hours per day searching for information in intranets and enterprise search tools"
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The findings and discussion come from a report from The Digital Workplace by Stephan Schillerwein available from Infocentric Research.

"According to Schillerwein, one of the main reasons for the problems of enterprise search is the lack of context. In days of old, information in the enterprise was found by secretaries — real persons, not computerized assistants — who knew who you were, what your job was and what you were currently working. A search engine has none of this context. "

Schillerwein takes a very personal approach - what the employees does, needs, and prefers. There is no mention of an enterprise taxonomy