Over the last several years I’ve been in the midst of helping companies build intelligent content applications using taxonomy, and almost all of these had already spend a pile of cash on search and content management technology, only to see it fall short of their vision. Many had even implemented component content in DITA or another XML vocabulary. Taxonomy helps to bridge the gap in several important ways.

First of all, taxonomy helps companies organize and manage their source content. A well designed taxonomy can become the basis for a metadata and content type strategy for the CMS, and the source of the controlled vocabularies that content authors and publishers use to classify their content. Content classification is important for defining the “aboutness” of content as well as administering it. We all need well-defined, clear, unambiguous terms for administrative metadata, including our organization structures, customers, products, information types, and information security classifications, to name a few important categories. Leaving CMS users to enter this metadata by freely typing exposes us to human errors and inconsistency. At a minimum, we want to maintain an authoritative term list and expose it in drop-down lists for users to select values when they upload content to the CMS. Users are usually able to enter this metadata with low error rates when selecting from controlled term lists, especially if their job is content publishing. The list just makes it easy and consistent.

For “aboutness” metadata, we need to help users be comprehensive and consistent, so we often use the taxonomy to inform a classification engine that analyzes the document and provides suggested metadata to the user. Subject classification schemes are conceptually similar to the subject headings in library card catalog systems – they start with broad domains and categories that are broken into increasingly narrower topic spaces. The big difference is that each organization will need to develop and maintain subject classifications that are relevant to their business content. For example, I’m helping a high tech manufacturer classify technical documents; their taxonomy covers technologies, manufacturing process steps, customer needs / applications, as well as symptoms, fault codes, and root causes for troubleshooting and repairing their products. They had a rich set of terms for all of these topics, some in a corporate taxonomy and others in specific systems for service and quality management.  Putting them into a taxonomy helped us use that information for auto-classification of content. Metadata is proposed to content publishers when they upload it to the CMS, and they can add or remove terms form the proposed metadata using the same taxonomy the classifier used. The result is that documents are now more completely tagged with “aboutness” metadata in the CMS.

Intelligent content doesn’t end with the CMS, however. Search engines classify content using their algorithms to match end-user search queries (what you type in the search box) to content – whether it’s unstructured document content or structured data in an enterprise system, or both. A search engine doesn’t understand your business – it only looks at all of your content as a “bag of words” that it statistically determines to be “about” something looking at unusual combinations of terms,  or high-frequency terms. A taxonomy can tell the search indexing engine that certain terms are more meaningful to your business, and that there are relationships between terms that matter when it comes to relevance.  Even if the search engine is placing higher value on metadata values, those usually contain “preferred” terms – the official business labels. Users, on the other hand, are not so disciplined when they type in the search box – they may use “non-preferred” terms. A favorite example is searching a NASA site for “moon buggy” when NASA calls the item the “lunar excursion vehicle.” The taxonomy can relate those terms so the search engine returns relevant documents – even if they never contain the term “moon buggy” or that referred to the acronym for it.  

Finally, taxonomy can be used to driving the search user experience in major ways. It can become the basis for the facets in search refinement, allowing users to narrow their search along the dimensions of the taxonomy (show me only information about these document types, or these products, etc.). It can define the terms we show in tag clouds and other interface objects. The taxonomy can also help the search engine identify related searches – for instance, all of the astronauts who ever drove a LEV, or the Apollo missions that included a LEV.

I’ve actually seen a recent example of an intelligent content application that is entirely defined in a taxonomy – the UK National Health Service has build a Flash application that lets you navigate a hyperbolic tree of symptoms and diseases, all of which is directly managed in a taxonomy and flowed directly into the portal. Their taxonomy aids search and results relevancy as well by taking terms like “AIDS” and assuring that search engine stemming doesn’t return documents that contain the terms “aid” or “aiding” – imagine all the results for “first aid”, “band aid”, “hearing aid”, or “health aid”.  

We also tend not to think of intelligent content systems as being driven by rather “dumb” legacy content, instead they are all about XML and structured content. In fact, most of the intelligent content portals I’ve worked on in the last several years were being populated by legacy PDF content – which was made intelligent only through the use of auto-classification with a well-crafted taxonomy and exposed through faceted search. For lengthy documents, document preview technologies can help hone-in on relevant pages – also being guided by the taxonomy to map search queries to preferred terms.

My conclusion in working with search and enterprise content management technology is that taxonomy development and management is a key success factor in creating effective intelligent content systems. Taxonomy can inform content types and metadata schema, make for consistent tagging, harmonize disparate structured data, and drive dynamic search and navigation user experiences, even with not-so-intelligent content.

 I’ll be presenting more on this topic with extensive examples at Intelligent Content 2011 in Palm Springs, February 16-18. Hope to see you there!

When businesses implement intelligent content, they usually adopt a “day forward” strategy that assures all new content is “intelligent” (i.e., is developed in XML and dynamically published), and they minimize the volume of legacy content to convert and migrate. Semiconductor equipment manufacturers – like many other capital equipment manufacturers – support products that last 30 years or more, so legacy technical content is critical to keeping that equipment up, running, and profitable for their customers.

In one such company today, that legacy content exists as monolithic manuals in PDF format that are hundreds of pages long, or as PDF renditions of engineering drawings, or as data in enterprise systems in relational databases or ERP systems. Field Service Engineers spend many hours per week searching for content across multiple systems – ERP data, content repositories, engineering websites, drawing repositories, knowledge bases, technical forums, email, personal notes – to find the procedures, drawings, reference information, and expert advice they need to effectively troubleshoot and repair customer equipment.

In the future, that information needs to be seamlessly integrated into a single-point of access that provides the Field Service Engineer with information that is relevant to their current context: the product they are working on, the customer account, the current configuration, the current problem or fault condition, the latest engineering information and best known methods – all without entering a word into a search box.

The challenge for intelligent content is simply stated: How do we get there from here?

In this presentation at the Intelligent Content conference, we’ll discuss this company’s unique pathway forward to intelligent content:

• The complexity and richness of content types and sources that must be unified through search and navigation for the end user (service engineers);
• Building a firm foundation with a sound information architecture including taxonomy and metadata;
• Taking the first steps with a modular content strategy based upon PDF documents in SharePoint, with a unified custom search experience;
• Transitioning in later phases of the project to intelligent XML content integrated with enterprise data in a seamless, task-focused interface.

There is nothing new under the sun. IBM has been dabbling with mash-up technology for several years now.  I had seen the previous incarnations demo’d at IOD (going back to 2006 and 2007) and the Enterprise 2.0 conference (2007), among other venues. Earlier monikers included Mash-up Toolkit, Mash-up Fabric, Mash-up Framework, etc. 

Previous capabilities included:

• a mash-up builder GUI
• widget libraries
• an enterprise Web Services directory
• tools for exposing existing data and RSS feeds as services
• various integrations (mostly around the Websphere stack)
• visual programming (a “pipes” metaphor)
• a wiki or portal framework for end-user access to the mash-ups

IBM even bundled partner software into previous mash-up toolkit offerings, including the JustSystems xfy client (JustSystems was a sponsor for IOD in previous years).

While it’s good to see that IBM hasn’t abandoned their investments in mash-ups entirely, their uninspired efforts to promote mash-ups (outisde of IOD), and the lack of progress over multiple years still leaves me with the impression that this is a half-hearted attempt to commercialize R&D, not a strategic product program. Mash-ups can fill a valuable niche in the enterprise, and I recommend them to clients who need data-document integration and enterprise application integration.  Mash-ups are particularly well-suited for “integration on the glass” – bringing information from multiple sources together, especially when little to no business logic is required for the end-user application.  Having a mash-up offering from IBM provides a “safe” option for enterprise architects, especially considering that other mash-up platform providers are struggling in the face of lackluster demand and weak adoption in the enterprise.

September 24, 2009
1:00-2:30 p.m. EDT

John Greene, Managing Director, Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC
Seth Earley, President & CEO , Earley & Associates
Mike Axelrod, Senior Consultant , Earley & Associates

What is the role of Web 2.0 and Social Media in the insurance industry? How do these new technologies and approaches for creating content fit in with more structured content processes?

In this first session we’ll survey the core processes of insurance operations, show what types of content typically supports such processes, and talk about how some of the newer approaches to collaboration and user generated content fit in to the big picture. Learn how Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC, the world’s leading risk and reinsurance specialist, utilizes social media from John Green, Managing Director in Global Marketing & Communications.

We’ll provide tangible examples of how improvements can provide bottom line benefits and how services can be better performed, products can be more accurately priced, and customer experiences can be improved by well designed content management approaches. We’ll discuss types of challenges in each of these areas and approaches for remediation.

Topics include:

• Overview of content intensive processes
• The use of social media in insurance
• How well architected content can improve knowledge flow
• Classes of content technology in support of insurance processes

Visit earley.com for more information or to register

You can add your own favorite blogs to the list on GoogleDocs.

Speakers
Robert Berry, Information Developer, IBM
Michael Harris, Information Architect, IBM
Erik Hennum, Information Model Architect, IBM
Paul Wlodarczyk, Director Solutions Consulting, Earley & Associates

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, at lower cost. For most organizations these days, component content is achieved by using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. When you’re using DITA and other component-oriented methods, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. It’s logical that DITA users would turn to taxonomy and metadata to improve findability of their reusable content.

Our research confirms that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. However, the use of native DITA metadata capabilities is rare, and many are also missing out on opportunities to use taxonomy for reuse and improved findability. We will explore the metadata capabilities within DITA and component content management systems, discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Check out the preview on SlideShare:

Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 Eastern Time
Cost: $50 (Survey respondents need not register and will receive an invitation to this call at no cost)

Register here.

Four years ago, a benchmark survey was conducted to understand how organizations understood and applied metadata to content assets and what business benefits they were realizing. Earley & Associates along with Taxonomy Strategies, launched a project to update this research. The goal of the study was to measure industry progress on a Metadata Maturity Model scale, a road map designed to help practitioners get started – and continuously improve – content tagging within organizations.

Preliminary results have shown that organizations that are more mature in metadata and taxonomy best practices outperform less mature organizations, with more mature organizations reporting findability and content management problems 10-15% less often. In addition to presenting results around maturity levels, this call will benchmark current search, taxonomy, and metadata practices against the 2005 survey and report on some surprising key findings around information access and best practices adoption.

Register here.

This is a very exciting development which assures the future of both product lines inside one XML powerhouse with all the resources of SDL behind it.  SDL plans to manage both products from a single business unit, to be called SDL XySoft.  The merger creates organizational stability, a seasoned and unified management team, a strong combined customer base, complete product offerings, and deep XML technical expertise.  We can expect the roadmap to develop quickly to align and rationalize the two platforms.   SDL has already disclosed intentions to focus Trisoft on DITA, and to aim Contenta at S1000D and DocBook. 

The full text of the press release follows:

SDL Announces the Acquisition of XyEnterprise, a Leader in XML Publishing and Component Content Management Software

With this Acquisition, SDL Offers the Most Advanced Technologies in the Market for Sharing and Publishing Structured Component-based Content

SDL Maidenhead, United Kingdom – June 29, 2009

SDL, the leading provider of Global Information Management (GIM) solutions, today announced the acquisition of XyEnterprise®, an award-winning leader in XML Component Content Management (CCM) and Dynamic Publishing solutions. With tight integration into SDL’s GIM technologies, this acquisition adds another building block for managing global content. SDL provides the industry’s only end-to-end solution for creating and managing global content. The technology provides a solution from authoring, to translation supply chain management, right through to the publishing of global content.

The acquisition of XyEnterprise builds on the momentum created by SDL’s earlier acquisition of Trisoft™ in 2008. Since that acquisition, SDL has seen a growing demand for technologies that manage, reuse and deliver product information across a company’s base of global customers, including everything from service manuals to user documentation. Moving into XML standards such as DITA and S1000D, companies are seeking ways to create, translate and publish structured content once and share that information across their global organizations and customer base. Global companies that have already adopted SDL Trisoft Component Content Management (CCM) system include companies such as HACH, VMware, NetApp, FICO, ESRI, Micro Focus, Yokogawa, DAF Trucks and Atlas Copco.

 

With the acquisition of XyEnterprise, SDL significantly expands its CCM and publishing product offerings and technical capabilities.  XyEnterprise products are recognized in the industry for leadership and innovation and currently support more than two hundred enterprise companies with thousands of users.

In particular, XyEnterprise brings to the SDL portfolio both XML publishing products (XPP™ – XML Professional Publisher and LiveContent™, an intelligent interactive delivery solution), as well as a new XML standard (S1000D) with XyEnterprise’s Contenta® content management software. In addition, XyEnterprise brings mature R&D, professional services and support teams into the larger SDL Group.

 

“XyEnterprise has a strong set of innovative products and is an impressive organization with expertise that will complement and enhance our current SDL Trisoft offerings,” said Mark Lancaster, Chairman and CEO of SDL. “XyEnterprise’s products and expertise will enable us to scale faster to meet the needs of our enterprise customers who are seeking competitive advantage in the global marketplace.” 

 

“Our acquisition by SDL will significantly enhance our ability to execute the product vision and meet the needs of a growing base of customers,” said Kevin Duffy, CEO of XyEnterprise. “The backing by a large public company in a consolidating market and the ability to tightly integrate our products with SDL GIM technologies will accelerate our ability to deliver on our customers’ vision of delivering tailored content to their customers on a global basis.”

With the XyEnterprise acquisition, SDL PLC, a UK-based company, is creating a merged business unit of XyEnterprise and SDL Trisoft that will be branded SDL XySoft™. XyEnterprise Inc., the legal entity, will continue to do business as a US-based, Delaware company. The addition of this new business unit makes SDL the definitive leader in XML Component Content Management and Dynamic Publishing. Global companies selling products into ten or more markets need to manage ninety percent of their content in other languages. SDL’s integration of SDL XySoft products with SDL’s GIM technologies will mean that companies can truly manage global content efficiently, moving products to global markets faster and at lower costs.

 

SDL XySoft will have a combined management team from the SDL Trisoft and XyEnterprise organizations, with Kevin Duffy, President and CEO of XyEnterprise, as CEO of the newly combined business unit, reporting to Mark Lancaster, Chairman and CEO of SDL.  SDL will continue to support both XyEnterprise and SDL Trisoft customers and products as the R&D organization moves to a shared component development model. 

 

Join us for an informational webinar on July 2nd, 2009 at 10am PDT/1pm EDT/6pm BST to learn more about the acquisition, the management team and the product roadmap. Register today at www.sdlxysoft.com/briefing. 

 

You can also find additional information, as well as a podcast interview between Mark Lancaster and Kevin Duffy online at www.sdlxysoft.com/acquisition. 

About SDL

SDL is the leader in Global Information Management (GIM) solutions that empower organizations to accelerate the delivery of high-quality multilingual content to global markets. Its enterprise software and services integrate with existing business systems to manage the delivery of global information from authoring to publication and throughout the distributed translation supply chain.

 

Global industry leaders rely on SDL to provide enterprise software or hosted services for their GIM processes, including ABN-Amro, Best Western, Bosch, Canon, Chrysler, CNH, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Philips, SAP, Sony, Sun Microsystems and Virgin Atlantic.

 

SDL has implemented more than 500 enterprise GIM solutions, has deployed over 170,000 software licenses across the GIM ecosystem and provides access to on-demand translation portals for 10 million customers per month. Over 1,000 service professionals deliver consulting, implementation and language services through its global infrastructure of more than 50 offices in 32 countries. For more information, visit www.sdl.com

About XyEnterprise

XyEnterprise develops, markets, and supports standards-based component content management, automated XML publishing and intelligent content delivery solutions that exceed customer expectations for reliability, productivity and ROI. XyEnterprise’s unmatched XML, DITA and S1000D expertise is the result of hundreds of successful deployments and is forged from lasting partnerships with customers for more than 20 years. Named one of KMWorld’s “100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management” for four consecutive years, XyEnterprise is committed to providing innovative solutions that deliver the highest possible performance and value to its customers, including dynamic publishing via the Web, IETMs and IETPs. XyEnterprise is headquartered in Wakefield, Mass. and has offices worldwide. For more information, please call 781.756.4400, visit www.xyenterprise.com or follow on Twitter at http://twitter.com/xyenterprise.

 

About SDL Trisoft

SDL Trisoft is one of the worldwide leaders in Component Content Management (CCM) systems for technical writing organizations. SDL Trisoft’s software empowers global organizations to single source content, easily sharing, reusing and personalizing content in various publication formats and in multiple languages across global markets.

 

Through efficiency gains, SDL Trisoft customers are able to accelerate the time to deliver information to global markets, drive down the cost of content development and translation, provide more agility for the overall business and increase customer satisfaction through access to better information.

 

SDL Trisoft customers include a number of large consumer electronics and mobile communications companies as well as the following: Atlas Copco, DAF Trucks (a Paccar Company), Océ, Micro Focus, HACH, FICO, NetApp, VMware, Still, Blondé,Yokogawa, Maruboshi, Linde Material Handling, Nautilus, and Mitsubishi. SDL Trisoft headquarters are in Mechelen, Belgium.

 

Find out more on SDL Trisoft at www.sdltrisoft.com.

 

Contact Information:

EMEA – Amy Hall (SDL)
01628 410120
amyhall@sdl.com

US  - Mary Galoski Parsons

1.781.756.5454

mary.parsons@xyenterprise.com

 

Nate Tennant (Kirk Communications)

1.603.766.4945 
natet@kirkcommunications.com

Free.  Register here

This session will cover issues in implementing an effective search experience and the range of available add-ons and compatible tools for extending SharePoint search functionality.

As the volume of information creeps steadily up in your SharePoint portal, so does the importance of sound navigation and metadata that can be leveraged for search. There are challenges around implementing hierarchical metadata and faceted search in SharePoint.

Lars Farstrup will discuss various options for creating an effective navigation and faceted search experience in Sharepoint. Paul Wlodarczyk will cover the range of available SharePoint add-ons and compatible tools to help you manage metadata, taxonomies and provide more robust search and tagging.

Topics include:

• Navigation pain points in SharePoint search
• Using faceted search for better navigation
• Build vs. buy scenarios for custom taxonomy & faceted search
• Taxonomy/Metadata/Search vendor landscape overview
• Specific tool features and limitations

Take the Survey

Depending upon context, “tagging” can mean one of three different things: tagging a document, tagging within a document, or tagging a content object.

Tagging documents.  These days most of us think of tagging as the keywords we put on our documents – like our photos and websites – so that others can find them when they search.  User tags are fine for finding photos in flickr, but for tagging to be effective in business we need to make it systematic, so that we avoid ambiguity and improve search recall and relevance.  So we’re increasingly “mature” in our approaches to tagging: We use taxonomy to organize our terms into classes and to manage the relationships between terms.  We develop thesauri and foreign language equivalents.  We integrate taxonomies and thesauri into search indexes for ECM and site search and SEO.

Tagging within a document.  I got interested in tagging in the early days of XML (back when we spelled it “S-G-M-L”), when we were tagging within documents.  By tagging unstructured content inside documents we could do really sophisticated things – not just multi-channel output.  For example, knowing that a paragraph in a document was a step in a service procedure or that a string of gibberish was a part number let us bring life to that content when we transformed it from markup into an interactive electronic technical manual.  Tagging let us turn books into diagnostic software.

Tagging reusable content objects. As content reuse matured with standards like DITA, organizations had more reusable components, with more people creating them in more departments.  Tagging reusable content objects became essential to actually reusing them – if you couldn’t find it, you’d never reuse it.  If you had a single service manual with 100 procedures, now you have at least 100 reusable content objects, so the search scope increased by two orders of magnitude.  At IBM, colleagues report having over a million DITA topics in more than six repositories, with over a dozen departments sharing content across thousands of publications.  Searching for content objects is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except you’re trying to find the right needle, and you have more and smaller needles to search amongst, in more and increasingly bigger haystacks.

Measuring Metadata Maturity.  Each type of tagging can have measurable benefits on your business.  Five years ago, Earley & Associates and Taxonomy Strategies developed a survey to understand metadata maturity for various types of businesses.  Earley is conducting an updated survey to see how organizations have moved up the learning curve.  Since we have a baseline of responses from five years ago, we’ll be able to describe how metadata and taxonomy practices have matured over time.  Also, the original survey was focused on the impact of metadata best practices on knowledge management and e-commerce search.  We now recognize that metadata is also used by technical communicators – especially those that use XML and other technologies to create, manage, and multichannel publish reusable content.  We want to hear from you all for the first time.

The survey is pretty detailed, so you might want to grab your favorite caffeinated beverage before you dig in.  As compensation for your time (about 15 minutes) Earley & Associates is offering these nifty incentives:

• A free pass to any future Earley & Associates Community of Practice conference call (a $50 value).  These are monthly, and the next one is Wednesday June 2^nd on Taxonomy for Portals featuring Giovanni Piazza, Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young, and Ralph Poole of Earley & Associates.
• A $200 discount on registration to the Henry Stewart conference on digital asset management, June 1-2 in NYC.  Seth Earley will be there presenting preliminary results.
• Free participation in a webcast reviewing the results of the survey (date TBA).

Take the Survey