Taxonomies%20of%20Knowledge:%20Building%20a%20Corporate%20Taxonomy

1

• Taxonomies of Knowledge Building a Corporate
  Taxonomy

Wendi Pohs, Iris Associates wendi_pohs_at_iris.com
2

• Definitions

• Taxonomy
• A hierarchical collection of categories and
  documents
• Structure and content
• Category
• Name of a group of documents
• Thesaurus
• A synonym list

3

• Back-of-the-book index

• Knowledge management, 5, 13, 21, 26
• taxonomy in, 11-13

4

• Search terms and phrases

5

• Manually created

6

• Definitions

• Clustering
• Automatically generating groups of similar
  documents based on distance or proximity measures
• Categorizing
• Analyzing documents and assigning them to
  predefined categories

7

• The Mantra

• Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder, but
  reflecting end user needs is as critical as
  representing texts....and it takes work!

8

• Benefits

• Discovery the serendipitous find
• Navigation browsing, relationships between
  categories
• Analysis previously unknown topics

9

• Benefits

• Reuse information
• Improve information quality
• Make new connections
• Identify affinities
• Enhance full text search

10

• High Level Process

• Determine user information needs
• Create initial taxonomy
• Edit, rename categories
• Create affinities
• Categorize new documents
• Test the UI
• Train the taxonomy

11

• Determine end user needs

• Audit information needs
• Audit content
• Is there an existing taxonomy?
• How clean is the meta-data?
• Look for existing descriptive fields
• Select sources
• Map to an existing business process
• Get functional buy-in
• Be format-agnostic, but look for lots of text

12

• Create initial taxonomy

• Rules
• Coverage wide or deep
• Number of levels
• Categories per document
• Documents per category
• Manual versus automatic

13

• Edit, rename categories

• Editing process
• Scan the entire taxonomy
• Spot-check the documents in the categories
• Focus on unique terms in the labels and assign
  new names as you go
• Move documents to appropriate categories when
  necessary
• Merge and delete redundant categories
• Term approval process

14

• Categorize documents

• Manual or automatic?
• Authors, content experts, or editors?
• Legacy applications?

15

• Test

• Test with users
• Use their UI
• Can users find what they need?
• Any missing categories?
• Do the groups of documents make sense?
• Do the categories complement full-text search?

16

• Issues

• Set appropriate expectations
• Control the organization of information
• Trust the system
• Human intervention vs impartiality
• Legacy controlled vocabularies
• Tight integration with IT/Admin