I have recently celebrated my one year anniversary with Dow Jones. It has been quite a year! I wear several hats here and that has given me the opportunity to meet a great deal of people in all areas of the business. How does it feel after a year? It feels great - I continue to be impressed with the caliber of talent exhibited by my colleagues. The domain knowledge, the business savvy, the passion for their work - it is very exciting and motivating to be surrounded by these people.

Yes - I love working with the core Dow Jones teams: the product champions, the technical staff, the marketing, sales and strategy teams for Factiva, Newswires, the Wall Street Journal. Yes, I also think it's pretty cool to talk to folks in other parts of NewsCorp: MySpace, Slingshot, Fox Interactive.

Today though I want to highlight some of the people I work most closely with. I'll start with some you haven't met yet on our blog - my internally focused team of Metadata Managers who, with their teams, keep our content organized: Frances, Annika and Bouriana. Three very bright and talented women who have a significant impact on the structure of Dow Jones' Intelligent Indexing, they quietly and diligently work to improve the quality of our content indexing to ensure the most relevant documents are returned in Search and Discovery. They are the champions of new branches of our taxonomies, builders of our ontologies, curators of our primary intellectual assets. And everyone here wants to build on their work - it's a significant part of our metadata platform. Huzzah ladies - and thank you for your dedication!

Then there's Marti Heyman. Who you'd have met by now if Daniela had her way! (Only partially teasing here Marti!) Marti and I joined Dow Jones at the same time to fill the shoes of two incredible folks - Dave Clarke and Trish Yancey - who were moving on after seeing to the smooth integration of their company, Synapse, after it's acquisition by Dow Jones. I got the product side, Marti got the consulting side of Taxonomy Services. It's been my pleasure to have known Marti for several years. For a long time it's been a small world, this group of corporate taxonomists, and we've had the pleasure of speaking together, chatting on TaxoCoP calls, and now working together to take this organization to the next level, taxonomically speaking. Marti's depth of knowledge, experience, and willingness to roll up her sleeves continues to impress me. I also love that she gets a few bees in her bonnet! (Perhaps someday we'll have her tell you about why you can't use ROI as a success metric for taxonomies!)

Marti's team has been a great joy to work with too - Ian and Dan have some of the most sophisticated knowledge of practical applications of cataloging and classification I've encountered outside the academic and library world. They are a phenomenal resource for our consulting clients. And how can you not love someone who puts up thousands of Christmas trees - as Laura and her family do each and every year - with every ornament cataloged?! Now, that's a true taxonomy geek!

Of course, this being a blog for Synaptica, I cannot overlook a team that practically runs itself: Jim S., Jim D., Sean and Daniela are the folks who make Synaptica what it is. Jim and Sean are the core of our technical team, and have the ability to deliver excellent code and great customer service. Mostly, I love that they don't groan too much when Daniela and I dream up some crazy new idea! They are usually right there with us, and I appreciate their creativity and willingness to try new things with the product. Jim S. is the pillar of the team, our Product Manager, Customer Champion, Pre-Sales Support, Trainer, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer! He takes great pride in his work and is one of the best PMs it has been my pleasure to work with. What can I say about Daniela? I daresay most of you know her already. One of the next Robert Scobles, Data Portability advocate, Super Librarian, She Geek. Daniela is our Business Development Manager, and in the last year she has done more good for Synaptica and Taxonomy Services than I ever could have hoped for. She is a true customer advocate, true Dow Jones advocate, and isn't afraid to do what it takes to get the job done. I've said how glad I am to work with her before, and I'll say it again: she is a force to be reckoned with - work with her if you can!

There are so many other wonderful people here, I'm looking forward to getting to know them better. We have an incredible team, and I encourage you to reach out to them to talk shop, to talk tech, to talk business. We are one of the few companies with capabilities that run the full spectrum of content management: indexing & classification, taxonomy management, ontologies, content creation, integration, processing & delivery, archiving and user interaction; and we enjoy our work immensely. We look forward to hearing from you!

Flickr image by daintytime

For some reason or another (lots of travel, several hats at home and work) I've had trouble finalizing this post. Earlier today though, I read Paul Miller's latest post on ZDNet. There seems to be some discussion about whether or not data is a commodity. I think there IS most definitely data that are a commodity.

Taxonomies are a valuable raw material in the management of information. A file that can be bought and sold and used to improve services. They can be generated by humans, machines, or even better: humans working with machines. Many taxonomies are a dime a dozen, with little to differentiate between versions of the same data. Some are like Kopi Luwak coffee - rare and extremely valuable. The word "taxonomy" is itself suffering from a kind of genericide. Classical definitions still apply: taxonomies have become commoditized.

The complexity of the controlled vocabulary will determine its value to a degree. A simple pick list should be easy and cheap to acquire - a list of countries, for example. Or colors, seasons, months - you get the idea. What is the value of a list of industries? Or companies? Maintenance is the primary cost factor - frequent changes require frequent updates, but an authority file in and of itself is not that complex. A broad and deep poly-hierarchical taxonomy I would expect to have more value. A poly-hierarchical taxonomy is one where a term in the taxonomy can have more than one parent term. Managing these relationships takes more time. An ontology - well, those aren't quite commodities yet, but they will get there. Why? Because they still require a great deal of thought and effort.

The source of the data will also help determine its value. Data from trusted sources - for whom integrity is paramount - should be valued higher. Is the data accurate? Is it maintained? Is it in a usable format? Does it have high availability? (Many quality vendors can be found at TaxonomyWarehouse.com.)

The uniqueness of the taxonomy will drive its value. Like our coffee example above, a taxonomy as ubiquitous as Starbucks will not be as valuable as say a pharmaceutical research vocabulary. Given the, uh, processes needed to produce Kopi Luwak, it is rare and therefore fetches a higher price, as would our R&D taxonomy.

The information security concerns also impact value. Our pharmaceutical company, or a financial services provider, is not about to release it's vocabulary into the wild. It is a significant intellectual asset that merits a substantial IT effort to protect.

I actually like the fact that taxonomies have become commoditized. Why? Competition drives improvement - in quality, in focus, in security and in usability. These are areas that the semantic web community needs to focus on - in my experience, security and usability need attention NOW. Good fences make good neighbors, and when we've got good fences, we can make more links and learn to trust. Icing on the cake!

Flickr image by INeedCoffee