Taxonomy and classification software can enable subject matter experts and knowledge engineers to collaborate in real-time to organise intellectual capital around business roles and requirements.
However, this software can only yield positive results if it organises information according to how people use it.
The value of taxonomies and classification is well known. Taxonomies can help people find information up to 50% faster than they could using ranked listings of search results. Taxonomies can uncover a wealth of knowledge you didn`t know you had. And classification enables high-value content evaluation applications for regulatory compliance, tax credit analysis and more.
But taxonomies and classification can only deliver these benefits if they organise information the way people use that information. If they organise information the way somebody in IT or marketing thinks it should be organised, or to reflect the way the company was structured two mergers ago, taxonomies will make information harder to find, not easier.
To keep taxonomies and classification applications relevant, you need software that enables subject matter experts (the people who know and use your taxonomies) who know your content to collaborate with knowledge engineers (the people responsible for the controlled vocabularies used in the business) who are experts in taxonomies and classification. You need software that can route recommendations for improvement from a chemical engineer in London to a knowledge engineer in Johannesburg, and that can then publish the improved taxonomies in real-time so employees in offices around the world can benefit from them.
Managing taxonomies
Taxonomies can help people find information up to 50% faster than they could using ranked listings of search results.
Garth Wittles, District Manager, Verity
Taxonomies and classification applications that are created and managed by the people who actually use them - the subject matter experts who know your corporate content best - have two unique benefits: they organise information in ways that make more sense to end-users, and they capture the expertise of your people and become an extension of your intellectual capital, not only a tool to manage it.
With the right workflow features, end-users can realise the benefits of distributed management in real-time: taxonomies can be created and deployed incrementally as categories and subcategory trees are available; improvements can be captured, reviewed and approved or rejected in minutes; and updates can be automatically published with as much or as little human oversight as needed to maintain quality.
By increasing the benefits of taxonomies to end-users, you also decrease the total cost of ownership of taxonomy initiatives and again increase the return on overall intellectual capital management investment as fewer dedicated taxonomy management resources are needed, and you can spend less time training, and more time using your taxonomy.
Distribution and collaboration
Taxonomy and classification software should allow you to distribute taxonomy and classification management to assigned subject matter experts and enable collaboration through workflow. It should also provide automatic publishing options with the flexible human oversight necessary to keep taxonomies up-to-date in real-time. Most importantly, it needs to integrate easily with existing applications to create a unified, distributable interface to manage all taxonomy and classification activities.
The software should also provide the ability to assign specific roles - with specific access rights - to end-users, subject matter experts and knowledge engineers anywhere in the organisation, and to distribute those roles down to a granular level. This means an individual can be an editor or managing editor for the entire taxonomy, a top-level category and all of its subcategories, or a single subcategory.
Typical user roles include: reviewer (can view the business rules that define a category and can make recommendations); editor (can make draft modifications to the structure of a taxonomy, the business rules that define categories and the assignment of individual documents to categories, but can`t publish changes); publisher (can approve modifications received from editors and publish them in real-time); and administrator (can assign roles to individuals).
Once a taxonomy has been created and published, you should have the ability to automatically assign, or publish, documents to each category. Each document can then be processed according to three configurable levels of human oversight: auto-publish (assigns documents that score above a category`s configurable "auto-publish" threshold to that category); propose (recommends documents below a category`s auto-publish threshold but above a specified lower "propose" threshold be assigned to that category, but routes the document to the managing editor for approval); and reject (documents below the propose threshold are rejected for the category).
Users must be able to manage taxonomies and classification directly through their Web browser. Look out for an interface that gives users access to: an intuitive user interface that provides familiar drag-and-drop of documents and categories across your taxonomy, and query tools that quickly locate documents and keywords to define categories; onscreen visualisation of document distribution that lets editors and publishers track, assess and improve assignment of documents to categories; category training (automatic classification) that defines categories based on the content of a chosen set of exemplary documents; business rule editing using 43 Verity Query Language (VQL) operators; thematic mapping that evaluates documents across the organisation, identifies themes, arranges the themes as categories in a hierarchical fashion and defines the categories with business rules; and import of existing taxonomies such as Web URLs, file paths, corporate taxonomies and third-party taxonomies.
Taxonomy and classification software must also scale to accommodate the growth of users, documents, taxonomies and categories. Scalability is crucial to protecting intellectual capital management investment as the business grows, its requirements evolve, and the way employees, customers and partners use information changes over time.
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