SERVICES
Knowledge Organization
We offer a range of services in the area of Text Analytics, a fast growing field that includes traditional taxonomy development but combined with categorization, entity or noun phrase extraction, and other metadata rich applications. We also offer traditional taxonomy development services including taxonomy strategy, taxonomy development and customization, taxonomy implementation, faceted taxonomies, and Web and Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure.
Text Analytics.
The core capabilities of text analytics (categorization, noun phrase and fact extraction, summarization, and sentiment analysis) offer the most dramatic improvement in information management in decades but they require experience and careful attention to strategy and design to get the most out of them. Text Analytics is the missing piece that can finally enable the expected return on everything from taxonomy and metadata projects to enterprise search and enterprise content management as well as provide a platform for a wide range of information and knowledge applications. We can help to design your entire approach to Text Analytics from initial evaluation to design and development to applications.
Taxonomy Strategy.
Taxonomies are not an end in themselves and it is essential that you have a clearly defined strategy that covers everything from a clear understanding of the expected benefits of developing a taxonomy to a realistic idea of the requirements in time and effort to develop a taxonomy.
If you have not yet developed this strategy we can work with you to create a strategy that can guide a taxonomy development and implementation initiative and if you have a strategy in place, we can both use it in a taxonomy development project and provide our expert feedback on any areas that the strategy does not cover.
Taxonomy Development.
We have a methodology for taxonomy development that is both proven to be effective and flexible enough to be adapted to any situation. We work from the top down with utilizing any existing taxonomic resources and high level interviews to capture high level concepts. We work from the bottom up with sophisticated text analytic software, supplemented by such resources as search logs when available. This insures that we generate taxonomy terms that reflect the actual vocabulary of your employees. The resulting preliminary taxonomy is then refined through validation sessions with your users and we also apply the latest theoretical approaches from category theory to uncover what are called basic level or natural level categories that represent how people in your organization most typically think and the labels that are most meaningful for them.Taxonomy Implementation / Metadata Schemas and Standards.
Taxonomies can be implemented in a number of ways in addition to the standard usage for indexing document collections. One of our signature services is to develop a framework in which the taxonomy is the means for integrating content management, metadata, tagging policy and methodologies, text analytics software, intranet and portal software, knowledge management platform software, and finally search applications.Either alone or in conjunction with taxonomy implementation, we also develop metadata schemas, standards, and implementation strategies and guidelines. This includes automated and semi-automated tagging and actual tagging of content collections.
Faceted Taxonomies and Faceted navigation.
In addition to traditional taxonomies, we have had great success over the last two years developing new types of faceted taxonomies along with the use of traditional subject matter taxonomies with faceted metadata based navigation. We have created an approach to developing faceted taxonomies in part by facetizing traditional taxonomies as well as utilizing entity or noun phrase extraction to populate the facets. We have developed a number of integrated navigation applications for both eCommerce and enterprise environments that utilize this combination of taxonomies and faceted metadata.Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 Infrastructure.
Once you get beyond a lot of hype about 2.0 approaches changing everything, it becomes clear that there are a lot of infrastructure and design issues that need to be carefully developed to support and guide 2.0 initiatives from folksonomies for blogs that can be integrated with simple taxonomies to creating an initial conceptual framework for wikis. Web 2.0 is not a replacement for knowledge architecture but does call for a shift in how users are supported by taxonomies, search, content management, and other traditional information and knowledge initiatives. We have developed an approach that integrates knowledge architecture with this new user focus that can be applied to both internet and enterprise environments.