Services: Taxonomy Design and Deployment Services

  Business Context

Most intranets fail to deliver acceptable content findability and navigation because they lack a consistent, business-oriented taxonomic foundation. Searches yield inappropriate results and navigation is hindered by inconsistent labels. unclear content hierarchies, and organizationally-siloed web sites.

A business taxonomy is an important investment for improving the quality of knowledge discovery and retrieval in an organization’s intranet. Although a taxonomy must be customized to the specific needs of a given organization to achieve its full potential, this process need not be overwhelming or unreasonably expensive, even for the largest organizations.

We have found in every organization in which we have developed a taxonomy that 80% of the required information is already available in (1) industry-specific public taxonomies, (2) existing IT data models in the organization, and (3) existing business process models.

  Typical Outcomes and Deliverables

SearchScience has created a rigorous and thorough taxonomy development methodology that can be applied in any organization. The key analysis, design, validation and deployment steps in this methodology cover the following outcomes and deliverables:

Step 1 – Analyze covers the necessary analytic steps to scope the taxonomy project, determine business objectives, and understand the inputs and required content characteristics of the taxonomy to be developed. The levels, clusters, and depth to which taxonomy will be developed are defined, representative source materials are collected, vocabularies are evaluated, and information needs are identified as use cases.

In Step 2 – Design, a candidate taxonomy is designed and populated. It is validated against the source content for completeness of coverage, accuracy of match, and relevance of subjects. An initial working model of how the taxonomy will be used is developed in preparation for user testing and validation. Taxonomy “exposure mechanisms” (how the taxonomy will support search and/or navigation) are identified and wireframe models are developed to illustrate the taxonomy-in-use for validation in Step 3.

Step 3 – Validate is devoted to conducting a series of focus groups or workshops to validate the candidate taxonomy with representative users and content owners. Examples, use cases, and scenarios are reviewed using the wireframes in a workshop format to test and validate taxonomy organization and effectiveness. In addition, the technical feasibility and level of effort required to tag, index and present the taxonomy through the various exposure mechanisms is assessed.

In Step 4 – Deploy, the validated taxonomy is loaded into a taxonomy warehouse, with tools for entry, editing, viewing, and ongoing maintenance. The processes and rules for tagging the content – both post-production and during initial deployment – are developed and implemented. Staff are trained, and ongoing taxonomy maintenance processes and procedures are launched. Key tasks in the deployment step include the following:

• Deploy all technical systems and tools
• Finalize and operationalize all rules and processes for tagging and indexing the corpus
• Train the taxonomy maintenance staff to support the deployed taxonomy
• Implement the selected exposure mechanisms in the search and navigation interface
• Index and categorize all content in scope
• Deploy the automated knowledge extraction and categorization tool for ongoing auto-tagging and indexing of new content as it is added to the knowledge base (optional)
• Launch the taxonomy solution

  Client Sponsorship and Participation Required

Successful implementation of a corporate or organization-wide taxonomy typically requires that a business governance and management structure be put in place prior to launching the project. High-level sponsors need to be identified for every organizational unit that will contribute to the definition, testing, refinement, and utilization of the taxonomy.

  SearchScience Expertise and Qualifications

Leveraging our proprietary taxonomy lifecycle development model and our experience developing taxonomies for some of the most successful companies in the world, SearchScience is highly qualified to help you create, validate, and deploy a multi-faceted enterprise taxonomy that will uniquely capture the knowledge categories and content of your business and organization.

  Timeframes

The timeframe for developing an enterprise taxonomy is highly dependent on the size of the organization and complexity of the taxonomic being built. As an example of a high-end solution, we recently completed an enterprise subject taxonomy for a large technology manufacturer that contained 6,590 categories across 22 top-level classifications. From initial analysis to final validation with more than 100 users the project took about 6 months to complete.