Innovation in Search? Tom Reamy Chief Knowledge Architect KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

2 Agenda  Introduction – 2.0 themes  Semantic Structures – Taxonomies, Facets, Facts  Social Structures – Folksonomies, Communities, Central Committees  Future Trends – Visualization, Semantics  Conclusions

3 2.0 Themes  “It’s MySpace meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets Google – on steroids.”  “It’s ignorance meets egotism meets bad taste meets mob rule – on steroids.” – The Cult of the Amateur – Andrew Keen  Web 2.0 Evolution not Revolution  Importance of Structure and Environment – Wikipedia – added 2,000 editors, not a crowd  Wisdom of Crowds – Great for guessing jelly beans, not for useful tags – Tyranny and Inertia of Majority  Two Themes: Social and Semantic Search

4 Semantic Structures  New content and variety of content – Blogs, videos, specialty sources  New complex (not complicated) search interfaces – Visualization – sliders and networks and time walls and … Beyond tag clouds = bad tags – Mashups (an unfortunate term) Can navigate to bomb making in Sudan Can navigate to terrorism in Africa – Multiple avenues for better findability and support social variety Monkey, Panda, Banana  Software generated metadata – Automatic categorization & entity extraction

5 Semantic Structures: Facets, Taxonomies and Ontologies  Facets are: – orthogonal – mutually exclusive – dimensions An event is not a person is not a document is not a place. – Intuitive, easier to develop and maintain – Variety – of units, of structure Numerical range, Location, Alphabetical, Hierarchical - taxonomic  Faceted Navigation is an active interface – dynamic combination of search and browse- dialogue – Facets are multidimensional filters  Taxonomy/Ontology – richer knowledge representation, complex relationships and context, multi-purpose assets

6 Facets and Taxonomies Example – Taxonomy, 7 facets – search, browse, faceted  Taxonomy of Subjects / Disciplines: – Science > Marine Science > Marine microbiology > Marine toxins  Facets: – Organization > Division > Group – Clients > Federal > EPA – Instruments > Environmental Testing > Ocean Analysis > Vehicle – Facilities > Division > Location > Building X – Methods > Social > Population Study – Materials > Compounds > Chemicals – Content Type – Knowledge Asset > Proposals

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8 Facets and Taxonomies: Future Trends

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10 Social Structures: Folksonomies, Communities and Committees  Folksonomies – keywords with social mechanism – Easy to tag, hard to find, hard to improve  Research formal and informal communities – Information behaviors, subjects, activities – KA Audit, Social Network Analysis  Discover communities – Use traditional methods (logs, other metrics) – Add folksonomies and blog categorization  New relationship of central (KM, IT, CM, etc) and communities – More sophisticated support, more freedom, more user input – New roles – users (publishing and tagging), central – create feedback system, tweak the evolution of the system, develop initial structures

11 Innovation in Search: Conclusions  Two themes – often in uneasy tension: Social and Semantics  More structure! More structure! More Structure! – Semantic – facets, taxonomies, ontologies – Social – well defined and understood communities – Metadata everywhere  How Search engine companies implement facets will be an important differentiator – built in or tacked on – Beware of facets as parametric search  New Displays – – CM – incorporate tag clouds and more advanced representations into user interface – Search – multiple avenues to content to support multiple minds

12 Innovation in Search: Conclusions  Look to Internet for ideas and enthusiasm  Look to enterprise for substantial value and breakthroughs  Semantics is really, really hard – remember AI?  Semantic Software is fundamental – Semi-automating tagging, build facets, categorize results  Semantic platform for search, search as platform – Text mining, targeted alerts, etc.  Let a 1,000 Blossoms Bloom – Social and Semantics combined – Top-down, bottom-up, prototypes and basic level categories

Questions? Tom Reamy KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services