An overview of how the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group uses semantic technologies / solutions for our own organization and for customers. This brief presentation was given at MIT to the Cambridge Semantic Web meetup on October 14, 2008.

At last week's conferences we had the wonderful opportunity to show the attendees how one of our customers utilizes Synaptica our Taxonomy and Metadata Management software.

Paula McCoy, Taxonomy Manager at ProQuest joined me on stage for two sessions during Enteprise Search Summit and Taxonomy Bootcamp. ProQuest provides global access to one of the largest online content repositories in the world and Paula is responsible for maintaining their controlled vocabularies that both editor's and end users use.

The case study addresses the challenges ProQuest faced in managing multilingual controlled vocabularies using multiple Word documents and authority files maintained in an Oracle database. During her presentations, Paula describes how implementing a thesaurus management tool helped ProQuest simplify and standardize its business semantic management to create a common language and connect disparate information assets as well as handling large and varied vocabularies and authority files, linking new and existing editorial systems and enabling hierarchical views, and automating thesaurus management tasks.

Note: Unfortunately the video does not focus on the slides during the taping like some of my other videos i posted from the conference so i have embedded the slides for you to follow along (maybe open a second window and click through).

The first session is 30 minutes and i go through what is and why customers use Centralized Taxonomy Management tools in the first 15 minutes and then Paula presents how she uses Synaptica daily to maintain the ProQuest taxonomies.

Centralized Taxonomy Management for Enterprise Information Systems

The second is a 45minute full Case Study (you only hear me introduce Paula and make some comments about how we need to make Taxonomy exciting!)

Finding a Common Language: Bringing Complex and Disparate Vocabularies Together

Thanks again to Paul McCoy who did an awesome Job!! Thanks!

For many organisations, providing a single way to navigate information resources is unlikely to meet the increasingly complex needs of a diverse audience of users.

Forcing users to locate resources in a fixed manner is usually the main culprit in most failed taxonomy implementations. This problem is especially pronounced when users are migrating from their own information 'silos' to organisation-wide repositoies. To reduce resistance from users and to ease the transition into an environment that is more conducive to knowledge sharing and collaboration, multiple taxonomies reflecting the preferred discovery patterns and terminology of different user groups are highly recommended.

Those who have implemented taxonomies may immediately balk at this idea, since it could lead to a maintenance nightmare. However, we found that it is possible to both customize taxonomies for different user groups and to keep maintenance efforts to the minimum. Of course, this must be done with the proper planning, understanding of user needs and the right tools.

And this is where Synaptica fits in perfectly. A key differentiating feature of the Synaptica taxonomy management tool is its ability to provide 'audience-centric' views to diverse sets of users, yet maintaining a single 'master' taxonomy. This nifty feature builds upon the foundation of a master taxonomy by allowing alternative preferred terminology to be defined for multiple audience segments via audience 'extensions'. Terms that are not relevant to a particular audience can be suppressed and additional details or depth that are needed by another audience can be developed - depending on which 'extensions' are being deployed onto the navigation platform (Intranet, portal e.g.).

Synaptica automatically manages the relationships between the master taxonomy and its extensions, thereby enabling consistent searching using diverse taxonomic views. More importantly, it makes maintenance seamless as changes in any term will result in automatic updates across all 'audience-centric' views, eliminating the need to duplicate efforts across multiple taxonomies.

With the help of the Taxonomy Services team at Dow Jones Client Solutions, various organisations are using, or are planning to use this feature in Synaptica to enhance the information discovery process and experience. For example, in a typical corporate setting, users from different departments can continue to browse their contents using familiar terminology and views, even though they are really using a larger enterprise-wide taxonomy. Such functionalities help to lessen user resistance while fostering knowledge sharing at the same time.

In a wider context, such as that of a digital library designed for the Public, 'audience-centric' views can be designed to provide optimized browsing for varied audience segments. For example, the browsing needs on a topic such as Health and Medical Sciences would be very different between the general public and academic/researcher segments. These are just some of the taxonomy design and maintenance considerations that Synaptica addresses.

What this all means is that with the help of an experienced taxonomy design team and the right tools, knowledge managers can truly lay the foundation for improved information discovery and sharing without having to worry about details that can already be addressed by using existing tools and best practices.

To learn more about Audience Centric Approaches please see this paper:'Audience-Centric Taxonomy: Using Taxonomies to Support Heterogeneous User Communities'. This paper describes how the National Library Board in Singapore intends to utilize audience centric taxonomy to provide enhanced information access to its multilingual, multi-cultural user community.

This post was co-written by Tan Pei Jiun, a Dow Jones Senior Taxonomy Consultant based in Singapore.

ImageFlickr stephanieasher