Products: Embedded Enterprise Taxonomy

A key feature of all SearchScience products is that they are taxonomy-enabled. Why is this important?

A taxonomy is a shared model that describes a domain of knowledge. The operative term in this definition is “shared”. An enterprise must have consistency in how it categorizes its content and people, or nobody can tell anyone else where to find anything. An enterprise without a taxonomy is like a city without street names and addresses. I may know where my house is, but I can’t tell you how to get there if you don’t share my personal naming conventions.

We believe a consistent enterprise taxonomy is a fundamental prerequisite for unleashing next-generation knowledge sharing and collaboration inside enterprises. Further, to achieve this effect the taxonomy must be embedded consistently throughout all mechanisms of knowledge creation, sharing, and discovery – blogs, communities, search, RSS feeds, content repositories, browse, navigation, and labeling.

In addition to the traditional taxonomies that every organization is familiar with – geography, organization, language, document type, etc. – our research has revealed the central importance of another type of taxonomy that few organizations have embedded in their enterprise knowledge management applications – the enterprise business process taxonomy.

Enterprise business processes tend to be relatively stable and well-understood by employees. Business units may be re-organized, but companies still design, build, market, sell, and support products. Finance may merge with Operations, but ‘manage finances’ and ‘manage facilities’ remain recognizable processes. We have found in our work with large corporations that categorization of enterprise activities and associated information along core business processes is an extremely effective way to make content more visible and findable across the organization.

SearchScience taxonomy research and implementation projects have resulted in the development of customized enterprise taxonomies for many of our clients. Our blog, community networking, RSS, and enterprise search engines are all designed to easily embed and leverage taxonomies as part of their functionality. This ability to embed and leverage taxonomies is a key differentiator that separates our products from competitive offerings.

  SearchScience Research Highlights

In designing, validating, and implementing enterprise taxonomies with our clients, we have learned many lessons. Here are some comments we have heard about the value of taxonomies in supporting enterprise knowledge management and collaboration in enterprises:

• Our information is siloed across multiple business units and regions with inconsistent organizing schemes. What we need is a single consistent model to tie it all together.
• Finally someone is using the work we actually do to classify information rather than hiding it under arcane categories.
• I was surprised how easy it was to find the information I was looking for by following the business process path.
• The intranet seems designed more from the perspective of the support functions than to meet the needs of the real revenue producers.
• Our ERP software is built around business processes, funny how the intranet never got aligned with that.
• Once the taxonomy is defined, it’s a lot simpler to tag new content, and auto-tag existing content, and that makes everything much more findable and sharable.

  Differentiating Features

SearchScience enterprise engines are designed and architected to work seamlessly with taxonomies. In addition, we have created a number of taxonomy templates that can be used to jumpstart the development of a unique set of enterprise taxonomies for any organization. Key features include the following:

• Easy embedding of taxonomy models into all SearchScience engines, including existing taxonomies, purchased taxonomies, and custom taxonomies.
• Easy to modify taxonomies with automated cascading of changes through all blogs, communities, searches, user profiles, and RSS feed categories
• Ability to import taxonomies directly from commonly used taxonomy tools
• Support for multi-level hierarchical taxonomies of arbitrary depth
• Support for poly-hierarchical taxonomies (terms can appear in multiple locations in the taxonomy)
• Support for multi-faceted taxonomies
• Complete taxonomy versioning and ability to roll back taxonomy changes across all engines
• Support for both taxonomic term relations (broader term, narrower term) and thesaurus term relations (related term, equivalent term, preferred term, non-preferred term, scope note)

  Engine Technical Specifications

Search Science applications employ a modular and extensible architecture to support secure, scalable and reliable services. The Search Science Engines are designed to integrate smoothly into existing IT infrastructure.

• Integrates with existing Security IT LDAP/Active Directory Infrastructure
• Can be rapidly deployed on easy to use off the shelf hardware
• Easy to use and maintain
• Supports integration with Taxonomy Management systems via custom adapters
• Supports WebServices SOAP based API

  Hardware Requirements

PC with 1 Ghz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 800MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system); Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended

• 1 gigabytes (Gb) of RAM or higher recommended
  (512 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
• 1.5 gigabytes (Gb) of available hard disk space
• CD-ROM or DVD drive

  Software Requirements

OS	:	Microsoft Windows 2000 Windows Advanced Windows 2000 Windows XP Pro
Database	:	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Oracle 8i/9i
Application Server	:	JBoss 3.x/4.x WebLogic 8.x/9.x
Java	:	Sun JRE 1.4.x