Coolheads Consulting Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting The Internal Revenue Service Tax Map Michel Biezunski Coolheads Consulting New York City, USA

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Providing better service to taxpayers l When taxpayers call the IRS for assistance, they don't always get the right answer. l Too much information, changing rapidly. l The call centers receives up to 1,000,000 calls a day. l Exploit existing metadata to display all information relevant to a subject

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting How Tax Map was Built l Started with a prototype with 8 Tax Information Publications (Dec. 2001) l Extended the prototype with 33 business Tax Information Publications l Added Frequently Asked Questions l Merged Publications and FAQs l Extended project to 95 Tax Information Publications l Added Tele-Tax Topics

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting First Prototype l Methodology  Design a topic map model.  Preserve the workflow.  Exploit markup for printed index.  Use an existing technology with some customization.  Set up an automatic process to produce HTML pages containing sliced publications + automatically created web pages for topic screens and indexes. l Results:  Much information becomes visible, but: Too many topics for easy navigation. Some inconsistencies in the indexing revealed for the first time by integration.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Subsequent Steps l Integration of more Tax Information Publications  1st step: 8  2nd step: 33  3rd step: 95 l Integration of the Frequently Asked Questions l Integration of the Tele-Tax Topics l Improvement of Graphic design l Improvement of Tax Map

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Side Effects of Merging Information l The "getting-together" effect  Publications are authored by tax experts who are providing reliable and precise information to taxpayers mirroring expert terms.  2 domains: Business and Individual domains use different terminology, with some overlap.  Frequently Asked Questions are authored using terms used by taxpayers writing to the IRS. Taxpayers have their own non-expert vocabulary.  Need to map the various vocabularies.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Improving System Efficiency l Difference between 3 kinds of subjects:  The "key topics", i.e. frequently used subjects appearing in the Frequently Asked Questions. Number: a few hundreds, as opposed to 8000 for all topics.  The "form topics", i.e. topics that refer to forms.  All other topics. l Differentiation of kinds of subjects is achieved automatically by different extraction procedures.  However, some subjects have been "upgraded" to key subjects by tax experts and call assistors who have picked them from the comprehensive list.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Merging/relating by name l Mapping done using 2 kinds of links:  Identity (Synonyms): Same subject, different terms. Example: "1040X" and "Amended Tax Return".  Related subjects: Nature of the relationships too complex to be differentiated into various relation types. Notion of "generic relationship" preferred. l 2 methods:  Automatic method: Rules designed for assimilating terms: Singular/plural forms, expression using permutations of same words, etc.  Mapping done by tax experts and call assistors (users) during a one-week seminar.  Result is a map containing topics to merge and topics to relate. This map is integrated with the map automatically derived from extracted topic markup from source documents.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Possible Extension Scenarios l Tax Map has been designed to be reused over the year with new source information coming in. l User feedback combined with input of tax experts will be used to maintain and improve the existing topic map. l Other document types can be added. For example, assistors use a "Probe and Response Guide" that leads them to qualify the caller and find the relevant topic. This document could be added to Tax Map. l Tax Map can be adapted for use by the public on the IRS web site.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting IRS Tax Map as a Reference l A "Published Subject" is a subject described and maintained by an organization that is intended to be linked to from outside. l The "IRS published subjects" (if any) could serve as navigation hubs for other users. l The IRS is the most authoritative source of information for tax information. It is responsible for defining and maintaining the terms that are used throughout publications that have to do with tax matters. l Consequently, IRS Tax Map is a good candidate to be used as a basis of reference for information sets which need to make use of tax-related information.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting The Internal Revenue Service Tax Map Pilot For use on the Intranet by assistors in the call centers.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Accessing the Subjects by Category Main Topics, enriched by a team of tax experts, are isolated from the total number of topics resulting from the integrated indexes of the publications as well as from the FAQs. Main topics are accessible through alphabetic indexes. Form topics are accessible through a specialized list. All other topics can be retrieved using the built-in search engine.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Browsing Documents 3 document types: Publications FAQs Tele-Tax Topics Hierarchical navigation to documents. Each pub has its own table of contents.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Browsing by Subject Resource Scope Resource Type Abstract Other names Main name Related Subjects (Main Name displayed)

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Bookmarks When a subject occurs within a page, navigation is enabled to the subject page, and to the next/previous occurrence of the same subject elsewhere.

 Copyright © 2003 Coolheads Consulting Demo l Click here to access Tax Maphere