[Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011 Takeaway] In a witty and informative sponsored lunchtime keynote Jeremy Bentley of SmartLogic surveyed the high ground that sits above text mining, search, content, metadata and classification.  Bentley named this high ground as ‘content intelligence,’ which also happens to be the brand name for SmartLogic’s enterprise platform.  Bentley observed that many organizations have multiple software tools to perform each of the core functions (multiple auto-categorization tools, multiple CMS tools, etc.), and that coordinating these disparate tools underpins the evolution to content intelligence and the semantic web.  The presentation is not available online, for more information visit www.smartlogic.com.

This fascinating video that we came across shows us the world of Social Media and Web 2.0 technologies today, and poses the question,"What's to come?"

How will you meet the challenges and opportunities of what these technologies bring to the party? Synaptica certainly looks to play a part in many new media strategies. Will you be there?

Terry Janssen of Lockheed Martin gave a very interesting presentation on Wednesday the 24th at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose. During his talk he discussed some of the technologies that Lockheed employs as a systems integrator to improve search within their own and other enterprises.

A common theme was revealed during his talk that was repeated by in several other presentations and by vendors at the Summit and its sister conference, Taxonomy Bootcamp. Namely, that taxonomies are the key to improving and refining enterprise search.

The Synaptica team likes to think outside the box- both with customers as well as with the use of our own tools, so I wanted to share with you some of the ways that we use Synaptica internally here at Dow Jones that might seem surprising if you think about taxonomy management tools as just that- a development and management tool for controlled vocabularies.

Beyond straightforward taxonomy and thesaurus management, which of course is the primary purpose for Synaptica, we have incorporated a number of other vocabularies and projects into to the tool and integrated them into our development and account management processes.

One way that we are using Synaptica is to manage accounts, contacts and even lists competitors. Given the ease with which one can set up uniquely designed vocabularies, it is no problem to create one dedicated to storing any of the above information and the appropriate details. Once the vocabulary has been created and populated, it is just as easy to begin to link companies and individuals to account information, notations about sales status, and even suggested projects for enhancing Synaptica.

In the same respect we utilize Synaptica to manage our ongoing projects and a general knowledge base for any issues that might be encountered by our user base. We can store a definition, the status and priority of the project, and link it to the company or individual that requested it. Using this method we can easily track every aspect of the work from start to finish. Each project assigned to a specific version release is marked using things like category labels and workflow flags to very closely monitor and track where we are with each proposed project for ongoing releases.

We are applying the tools and functionality of Synaptica in ways that may not seem immediately apparent, but given the flexibility of the application there are many ways that one can find to creatively employ the features and functionality of Synaptica. Contact us today to find out more about how you can use Synaptica to assist with your internal processes, even in ways you may not have thought possible!

Hello Synaptica Central visitors and welcome to the inauguration of our informational site to teach about and discuss Dow Jones’ vocabulary and metadata management tool, Synaptica. My name is Jim Sweeney and I am the Product Manager for Synaptica. I have been working with or directly working on this application for nearly the last 10 years and it has been quite the journey considering where Synaptica started and where it is today.