Section 20.5. What s Next

20.5. What's Next

The initial success of MSWeb's approach is exciting, but it's just the first step over the course of many years and phases to come. To some degree, the team expects continued growth in what's currently in place: more resource records, more robust taxonomies, and more sites coming on board and utilizing an increasing array of SAS services and MSWeb consulting. But the MSWeb team also hopes to try out some interesting new plans in the not-too-distant future.

One exciting possibility is an increased role for other business units in the creation of an even more mature infrastructure to support enterprise-wide information architecture and content management. MSWeb isn't looking to own this endeavor but to move into a leadership role, with other units playing the role of partners. In this scenario, Microsoft will save money because its business units will engage in increased sharing of taxonomies and related tools and efforts. Additionally, a greater degree of awareness among content managers might result in more willingness to go along with future centralizing initiatives, such as requiring the registration of resources in order for them to be indexed for searching. This trade-off might make for a little more work on the part of content owners, but it will result in improved searching for users, as well as much more efficient content management practices, by establishing who's responsible for what content, when it should be updated, and so on.

Even more exciting is the possibility of creating something of a Microsoft "semantic web" along the lines of what Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, and others have proposed.^[*] Much like the content models covered in Chapter 12, a semantic web allows connections to be made automatically between related content objects. Some of the tools described in this chapter could be extended to support such automatic associations; for example, the taxonomies developed by different Microsoft business units could be "cross-walked," meaning that relationships between similar terms or "nodes" in the taxonomies could be established. These relationships could go a long way toward improving search across Microsoft's intranets because content with different tags and similar content would be retrieved together. VocabMan and the SAS console already have built-in support for related tags, which will enable future cross-walking of taxonomies.

^[*] Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, "The Semantic Web," Scientific American, May 2001 (http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html).

The concept of a semantic web offers much more potential. Alex Wade, Manager of Knowledge Access Services, sees a future where semantic objectsnot physical documentsare the atoms that make up the MSWeb universe. He states: "We don't draw many lines between objects today, and when we do, these are rarely delineated; now we're moving to semantically derived relationships." He'd like to see a semantic MSWeb provide access to people, places, and things that are connected by "strong rules" or relationships; once an initial set of rules is seeded, new rules can be inferred. This web of relationships could have a hugely beneficial impact in an intranet environment like Microsoft's, where it's often as important to find the right person as it is to find the right information. This transition requires a paradigm shift for information architects: as Alex suggests, we'll need to "stop tagging documents and start drawing relationships between objects. Eventually they'll have different types of hierarchical, associative, and equivalent relationships."