Nowadays there are any number of applications that can help people create taxonomies and place objects of information within the categories as and how they please. However the amount of automation and artificial intelligence, as well as knowledge representation used can greatly vary amongst the options. Certain programs only allow users to add a URL to a specific sort of category whereas other options enable humans to create actual rules according to which the system works. The overall niche of this as well as the cloud computing revolution now are able to accept a training set within a taxonomy and will place documents in categories based on the the similarities that the information may have. As time has progressed, certain applications have now also enabled users to automate the entire process whereby users can now group pages into the type of topics which are based on the programmable evaluation of contents.
The one thing to remember however is at the end of the day they are still applications that use artificial intelligence and thus the human mind, if used effectively can beat them at their own game.
According to Paola Di Maio in 2001, and even if we exclude what this person said and think more along the terms of common sense and the evolution of information, with every day, the amount of information is increasing exponentially. Whether it is through the collaboration of humans on the internet, or even through research, the world is coming closer and more knowledgeable by the day. It is through this information explosion, that the world is now facing a crisis, and the top companies of the world, are still waiting and figuring out ways to organize all sorts of information around us. That according to Di Maio, is the next step in the evolution, as well as the challenge of the future. Online taxonomies were according to him the future, or the next step, rather leap in information science.
Now that the evolution of taxonomy and the information age has been discussed in great detail, the next step in this hierarchy of ideas is that of a proper solution. The only way for information to be organized on a day to day basis, as well as, to bring some sanity to the sense of chaos that prevails in our minds due to the information explosion, was to open it up to interpretation, as well as share it with everyone for their mutual benefit. Enter the World Wide Web and the internet revolution. As people started joining the revolution, people like the founders of Alta Vista and Yahoo realized that it was time to organize everything. This lead to the evolution of search as we know it. The diagram on the next page explains the evolution and the various stages that were passed to reach the stage which now prevails. A stage at which most people think it cannot get easier to search for information, yet the top gurus of search just met last week to discuss and debate the future of this business and what the next step in evolution should be.
It all started with keyword search, and this theory came up to try to tame the monster that we call unstructured information. The best way to do this was to ask the algorithm to look for certain keywords and then organize information and pull information accordingly. The next step involved more than just key words and instead of just words, their relevance was also judged which lead to the stage of page ranking. With the search realm now growing and regulation coming in the age of parametric, federated and secure search came in, so that users were now allowed to search for their relevant information from all the information that was needed. We now stand at the crossroads to all this change, where audio, video and all sorts of formats can be searched in detail at the click of a button and now the newest level is that of Integrated Meaning Based Computing or MBC.
In order for users all over the world to fully reap the benefits of integration and borderless access to information, they started collaborating on the internet. Whereas the evolution of collaboration can be traced back to the time of Darwin and his experiments, the principle lies in a very popular euphuism, two heads are better than one.
As the use of the internet increased, collaboration increased and the need for tools that made it easier was felt. Thus collaboration tools were formed so that people from all corners of the world, could work together and benefit from each others experience and expertise. According to Jace Ricafrente, the world is now so fast paced that collaboration is not an advantage, and is actually a necessity for success. Also the new name of the game is not just success but sustained collaborative success. It is only a matter of time, when collaboration tools start becoming free and a new charging model takes over, since high prices for collaboration tools are now seen as a hindrance.
If one chooses to further explore the relationship between taxonomy and the currently available collaboration tools, Dave Clark, Global Taxonomy Director of the Dow Jones Company gives some excellent arguments in favour of e- collaboration and its future. As he puts it, the world will now depend on the collaboration of the best minds when the come together to achieve any objective. In a world of unlimited and unstructured information, it will take the finest to beat the finest at their own game. The common pitfall that over enthusiastic people usually encounter is the problem of not organizing their collaboration effort properly. According to Clark, the areas that need most focus are the preliminary stages and that is where most people falter. Companies or individuals, need to first focus on the Who, What and How of the taxonomy implementation before they actually do anything.
Take the example of the Dow Jones Company, the company has to handle massive volumes of data twenty four hours a day. Over five hundred thousand documents in a twenty four hour day, from over ten thousand sources and in twenty languages. If that is not enough, the company needs to handle over three hundred and ten thousand company codes, over eight hundred and twenty industries, over five hundred and twenty subjects from over three hundred and fourty regions. If even this is not enough to surprise a person lets look at the total figures again. Three point six million documents, from over seven hundred feeds, in one hundred and fifty countries, driven through a sixty terabyte server
Now, on to the Who of the system in place. The Dow Jones Company has a great deal of people working in cross functional teams that need to collaborate all the time. The areas that need help include metatagging, content integration, knowledge management, Information technology and many more. In order to organize and use all the above amounts of data, the cross functionality and search capabilities need to be far superior than any other to ensure proper collaboration for business success.
Within the WHAT category, there are four stages that come around to Asses, Design, Build and Maintain. Only if all of these functions are handled properly will the collaboration be proper. Thus business goals need to be assessed, the taxonomy needs to be picture perfect and user friendliness superior. Only then can the design be built to ensure proper reporting, analysis and assessment of the data that keeps filtering into the system. During the Build phase, proper taxonomic schemas and IT systems need to be put in place to ensure delivery of benchmarked and best practice level service. However, the most important function within the four can be debated between the first and last stage. The last stage includes the Maintain stage. During this stage, the system is seen as constantly work in progress with regular improvements and tweaking taking place. Thus using a customer centric approach Dow Jones continuously engages in focus groups with the end user to ensure that the best possible standards be applied to their system.
Within the How stage, governance and regulation needs to be introduced to ensure that collaboration remains up to the mark with a proper system of checks and balances in place. This is to ensure that the web workspace be efficient, the cross functionality receptive and ready to unforeseen changes as well.
In summary taxonomy lies at the very core of all that we do today. As one of the worlds leading taxonomy experts, Oliver Marks puts it on a comment on ZDnet, if Taxonomy were not adequately used in todays workforce, our lives would amount to chaos with the soundtrack to the tune of U2s I still havent found what Im looking for
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