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Now that we have shared more than you ever planned to learn about taxonomies, semantics, and artificial intelligence, it's time to tackle the implementation of your portal taxonomy. There are three general approaches to creating taxonomy:
You may find that two or even all three approaches have value for your project. Bear in mind that taxonomies are never really complete as long as new content is being added. They grow and evolve over time in response to the changing demands of users. The taxonomy industry has continued to grow and now offers a wide range of technology and products at various price points. Small to mid- sized companies are now also able to offer their employees and customers the same benefits formerly available only to corporate behemoths. In addition to public Internet and corporate portals, taxonomies are also finding their way into vertical portals, customer and partner extranet sites, and even to very specialized knowledge worker document repositories. Automatic Taxonomy Creation and Document CategorizationMicrosoft does not currently offer a product that automatically categorizes documents or creates taxonomy. Several other vendors have taken this approach, however, and you can use these third-party products to search and categorize your web pages, documents, and other content sources. A number of algorithms have been developed to enable categorization of data repositories. In its taxonomy and content categorization study, the Delphi Group identified several basic algorithms, including:
Even vendors of automated taxonomy tools (Table 10.3) concede that human judgment is essential to a finished taxonomy. Their tools can save time and money, however, and find patterns in data that would not be obvious to the analyst. Table 10.3. Taxonomy and Categorization Tools
Human Taxonomy CreationThe second approach discussed here is to unleash a specialist in taxonomy development to master the domain of your portal and formulate a taxonomy. This approach might be expensive and time consuming, but the taxonomy would benefit from the expertise and experience of the analyst. Many portal projects have taken this approach. One risk is that the taxonomy development might expand to soak up too many project resources and make it more challenging for the project to remain on schedule. Assisted Taxonomy Creation and Document CategorizationThis third approach is a hybrid of the first two. It involves human analysts in conjunction with automated taxonomy and search tools. There are many sources of data that can help with taxonomy development. Search query logs, analysis of library reference requests , focus group results, findings from in-person interviews of individual knowledge workers, and survey results are all indicators of what content each segment of employees needs, and on what schedule. These sources also tell you about the knowledge workers' information-seeking behavior, which in turn lets you know which access methods (such as searching and browsing) and access points (such as metadata elements) you need to use in schemas and in descriptive and navigational taxonomies. |
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