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Buy, Build, Automate: Why you should Buy Your Taxonomy. Tom Reamy Chief Knowledge Architect KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com. Buy, Build, Automate – How to Decide?. A hierarchy does not a taxonomy make. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Buy, Build, Automate: Why you should Buy Your Taxonomy
Tom ReamyChief Knowledge Architect
KAPS Group
Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
http://www.kapsgroup.com
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Buy, Build, Automate – How to Decide?
A hierarchy does not a taxonomy make.– Browse structures, categorization engines, file plans
Taxonomies are infrastructure resources, not a project Subject matter is important
– scientific standards – Mesh, etc.– Limited domain – wine, geography
What is it used for? Indexing, browsing. How is it evaluated? Formal metrics, usability
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Automatic taxonomies aren’t
Quality of automated taxonomies is poor.– Unusual hierarchy, uneven granularity, weird node names
Expensive software that does only one thing – and does it badly
Taxonomies are about meaning – and automatic taxonomies are about co-occurring chicken scratches.
Don’t forget the cost of the programmers to install, maintain, customize – and the upgrades!
Still need human categorizers – edit, sanity check
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Building a taxonomy is really hard
Custom built taxonomies are the most expensive way to do it.
Who Builds? – taxonomist wannabe, consultant– Taxonomy development is not for the faint of heart – it’s hard
and requires special skills– Mercy of high price consultant
Hard to maintain – user’s change, so taxonomy needs to – often!
Representing user’s thinking – but users think so badly!
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The Solution – Buy Your Taxonomy
Formal taxonomies are fixed resource – little or no maintenance
Formal taxonomies support communication– Your content is not completely different
Formal Quality Metrics– Corpus, coverage, nomenclature, dependency– No mixed classes, noun forms, proper speciation– Bell Curve, balance of breadth and depth
Quality of taxonomy is high – teams of professionals, vetted over years with multiple customers
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Conclusion
There is no such thing as “One size fits all” with taxonomies Building a taxonomy is expensive, hard to do and hard to
maintain Automated algorithms don’t work with context, know the
relationships between topics, or understand your business or application
Classification on top of a formal taxonomy can represent users perspective, support multiple applications, and enhance communication within and between companies
Questions?
Tom Reamy – KAPS Group – [email protected]
Jim Wessely – Advanced Document Services - [email protected]
Wendi Pohs – InfoClear Consulting –[email protected]
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Real Conclusion – all of the above
Buy a taxonomy or find taxonomic resources – for some subjects– Budget for customization
Buy software that automates some of the process, especially categorization & content management
Build taxonomies for some subjects – using software, existing taxonomies or other information structure resources
Hire professionals – don’t try this at home Taxonomies are living, breathing, evolving structures – plan
accordingly Taxonomies are not expensive – compared with search, CM,
portals – and not finding/using content