Enterprise Level vs. Team Level Taxonomies
Many of our clients ask us how to maintain taxonomies at both the enterprise and the team level without duplicating effort, overcomplicating systems, or burdening end users with multiple metadata fields. Depending on the size of your organization, the size … Continue reading »
Best Practices for Successful Metadata Governance
Metadata governance is often seen as burdensome, tough to implement, and even harder to prioritize. When organizations embark on a metadata initiative, they tend to focus on design and development rather than governance. Metadata and taxonomies are living tools that … Continue reading »
Keys to Successful Ontology Design
Ontologies can capture highly complex ideas and business logic, provide more intuitive ways to structure information, and can ultimately power new use cases, such as semantic search, recommendation engines, and AI. While many organizations aim to leverage an ontology, they … Continue reading »
Why a Taxonomist Should Know SPARQL
As the Knowledge and Information Management field moves towards adopting semantic technologies like ontologies and enterprise knowledge graphs, taxonomists and taxonomy managers need to know about W3C semantic web standards including RDF, SKOS, SPARQL because data is becoming more interconnected … Continue reading »
How Leveraging Existing Taxonomies Can Jumpstart Ontology Design
Taxonomies and ontologies are both types of Knowledge Organization Systems, or KOS. Different types of KOS can be seen as a continuum, starting with a simple folksonomy where users of content can add free form tags with no control or … Continue reading »
How to Distinguish Between Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Metadata Fields
When designing an enterprise taxonomy, the number of possible metadata fields that can be used to describe content can be overwhelming. Depending on the type of content, the size of the organization, and the breadth of that organization’s functions, the … Continue reading »
Achieving a Gold Standard Taxonomy
One of the first steps of a taxonomy design effort is to gather any previous taxonomies that may exist within the business, as well as sample content, search logs, and pre-existing information about these taxonomies’ content or systems. At EK, … Continue reading »
Taxonomy Design and eDiscovery: When the Lawyer Calls
We have all heard about the exponential growth of electronic information/data/content in recent years and been warned about the impending boom of data and information growth in the near future. Industry research has told us that the time spent looking … Continue reading »
Cleaning Up Content Cobwebs
Every Knowledge Management (KM) effort should include cleaning up existing content, whether the goal is migrating to a new system, implementing a taxonomy or search tool, or just clearing the clutter of old, irrelevant content cobwebs. Regardless of your KM … Continue reading »
Taxonomy Lines Blur Without Governance
Taxonomies are constantly evolving and growing alongside the businesses they serve. Users are not static and neither are their processes or the content they create and consume. Ensuring that the taxonomy grows holistically means keeping the entire vocabulary in mind … Continue reading »