Organizing Knowledge KM Summer Institute June Michael Crandall

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute2 Pre-Assignment Watch the following video –Video - SharePoint 12 and ECM. Rob Lefferts, a Program Manager for SharePoint, sat down with me to discuss what's new in the next version of SharePoint that will ship as part of Office System 12. We specifically explored SharePoint's Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features and how this may impact the industry and customer buying decisions. Think about the following questions and bring your answers to class tomorrow –What kinds of knowledge objects are being organized in SPS? –Is content the only thing being organized? –What is the difference between the platform (SharePoint) and the application? –What type of work might need to be done to move from the platform to an application?

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute3 Agenda What are we doing? –What are we organizing? –Where does formal knowledge organization fit in a KM system? –Why would you want to do this? –How can you use explicitly organized knowledge? How do we do it? –What are some common approaches to organizing knowledge? –What is metadata? –How do you build a taxonomy? Case study The real world –What do taxonomies cost? –Alternatives to formal knowledge organization systems

Part 1: What are We Doing?

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute5 MS video discussion What kinds of knowledge objects are being organized in SPS? Is content the only thing being organized? What is the difference between the platform and the application? What type of work might need to be done to move from the platform to an application?

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute6 What is an Information Object? Think of David Levy’s example of a cash register receipt –Throwaway piece of paper that is rich in information –Where did the information come from? –Is the object the only actor in this scenario? “Within its local circumstances, what kind of a thing is it? What work is it doing, and why is it doing it?”

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute7 The Big Picture Selamat & Choudrie, 2004 We’re here But don’t forget the rest

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute8 KM Framework Phone Meetings Discussions Human Interaction Taxonomy Architecture Common Vocabularies (MS and Non-MS) Metadata Registry Taxonomy Admin Tools MS Metaschema ModelNon -MS Metaschema Models Business Applications Document Store Exchange Platinum BackOffice SQL 7.X (DTS OLAP) Windows 2000 (DFS, IIS,Active Directory ) Technology Infrastructure MTS KM Framework Ad hoc communications Knowledge Capture Tools Knowledge InfrastructureCollaboration Processes Create/Author Document Versioning Check in Check-Out Approval Workflow In-Context discussions Search/Retrieve Intelligent/Relevant search & browse Personalization Subscription Publish MultiSite Publishing Localization Notification Storage Organize Usage Analysis Meta Data Tagging Storage MS-Office /OSE MS- Project Outlook Site Server Outlook Team Folder Tagging Tools Exchange Platinum PubWiz Interprress Site Server OSE Office Outlook MS-OLAP English Query

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute9 Purpose of Metadata Arlene Taylor lists 6 functions for metadata-- focused on libraries, but apply more broadly to any information system –Identifying the existence of objects –Collecting parts into wholes –Creating collections of objects –Producing lists of these objects –Providing access points for the objects –Locating the objects for use Taylor, Arlene G. The Organization of Information. 2nd Ed. Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute10 How do You Use Metadata? Content creation- tagging Site navigation- categories Information retrieval- search Personalization- delivery

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute11 News Publishing Tool

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute12 MSWeb Search

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute13 Taxonomy Example - faceted

Part 2: How Do We Do It?

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute15 Ways to Express Meaning: for people & machines General Logic Glossaries / Controlled Vocabularies Data and Document Metamodels Formal Knowledge Bases & InferenceInformal Taxonomies and Thesauri Terms Thesauri formal Taxonomies Frames (OKBC) Data Models (UML, STEP) Restricted Logics (OWL, Flogic) Principled, informal taxonomies ad hoc Hierarchies (Yahoo!) structured Glossaries XML DTDs Data Dictionaries (EDI) ‘ordinary’ Glossaries XML Schema DB Schema Boeing Technology | Phantom Works | E&IT | Mathematics and Computing Technology Michael Uschold. Copyright © 2004 Boeing. All rights reserved.

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute16 The Workings of the Black Box Soergel, D. (1985). Organizing information: principles of data base and retrieval systems. Academic Press, Orlando, FA, Chapter 5: The structure of Information systems.

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute17 Implications “Information systems can be used not only in finding material that already is in evidence, but also in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as (new) evidence for some purpose” Michael Buckland quoting Patrick Wilson Design of information systems needs to consider both the characteristics of the objects and the needs of the users

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute18 Steps in Information Organization Decide what to organize – the objects themselves, or representations/descriptions of them– and how they will be represented and organized Select or create techniques, tools, and standards for specific user group(s) and specific resource types to support creation of resource representations and organizations Create resource representations/descriptions Organize, retrieve, and display resource representations or resources Provide access to resources

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute19 Building Taxonomies Define your domain Gather concepts –From user interviews, search logs, content analysis, preexisting vocabularies Select your approach –faceted vs. enumerated (thesaurus) Extract terminology Control your terms Organize your terms Maintain, maintain, maintain

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute20 Roadmap to Terms Taxonomy terms: DOMAIN: a sphere of knowledge, influence, or activity –TAXONOMY: a classification of elements within a domain CLASSIFICATION: the operation of grouping elements and establishing relationships between them (or the product of that operation) –RELATIONSHIPS: a defined linkage between two elements »ELEMENT: an object or concept These are applied to: ITEMS: (aka resources) individual pieces of information

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute21 Roadmap to Terms (cont) By the use of: METADATA: (aka properties, attributes) information describing types of data. Metadata can be considered a formula for describing an item; an abstract concept instantiated in schema, elements and tags. –METADATA SCHEMA: A specified set of metadata elements METADATA ELEMENT: (aka tag name) a label name for a class of metadata –VALUE: a term authorized for description of an item under a specified tag Elements and Values are combined to form physical representations in a: TAG: a metadata element, paired with a value

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute22 Roadmap to Terms (cont.) Which may or may not use values from a: –VOCABULARY: selection of terms, classified or sorted TERM: one or more words designating a concept To create: –CONTENT: an item and its associated metadata

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute23

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute24 Many organization schemes Taxonomies FromRosenfeld, L. & P. Morville. (2002). Chapter 9, “Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata” in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. (p ).

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute25 Elements of a Taxonomy 1. Equivalence 2. Hierarchical 3. Associative (Broader) United States (Preferred) Vermont (Narrower) Burlington (Variant) VT (Variant) Green Mt. State (Related) Skiing (Related) Maple Syrup Morante, Marcia. Creating Useful Taxonomies: Metadata, Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies. SLA – PER Division, June 8,

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute26 Thesaurus Example Morante, Marcia. Creating Useful Taxonomies: Metadata, Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies. SLA – PER Division, June 8, Development_SLA_ ppt Development_SLA_ ppt

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute27 Facets at wine.com Facet / Metadata# of vocabulary terms Type46 Region16 Winery750 Price6 Rating6 Total terms824 Total combinations1,656,824 Morante, Marcia. Creating Useful Taxonomies: Metadata, Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies. SLA – PER Division, June 8,

Part 3: Case Study Microsoft Sharepoint Server

Part 4: The Real World– Money and Change

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute30 Costs of Metadata Basic question should really be what are you trying to accomplish, and does metadata add value to your project? Startup costs can be high, but maintenance costs will be at least equal if not more Good metadata systems require resources– people, machines, and time Don’t start without an understanding of what those might be

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute31 Example Startup Costs

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute32 Example Maintenance Costs

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute33 Alternative Approaches

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute34 Alternative Approaches What about folksonomies and social tagging? –What problems can they solve? –What issues do they raise? How many people are likely to tag? What about synonym control? Does it matter? Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. Arnold Toynbee, historian( )

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute35 Where Does Knowledge Organization Fit? We tend to think that the hard problems are the big ones. So we believe that searching the Web is hard because it's so huge. But I've been thinking lately that the really hard problems are actually the ones in the middle. In the middle, many algorithms don't work that well with moderate document sets, context becomes more important, interaction is critical, and you can't get the user "in the ballpark" anymore--you have to get them right to the thing they're looking for. Karl Fast-

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute36 Questions??

June 14, 2006KM Summer Institute37 Readings Pre-work Microsoft Corporation. Video - SharePoint 12 and ECM. Required Levy, D. (2001). Meditation on a receipt. Chapter 1 of Scrolling Forward. New York: Arcade Pub. Selamat, M.H. & J. Choudrie. (2004). The diffusion of tacit knowledge and its implications on information systems: The role of meta-abilities. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(2), Rosenfeld, L. & P. Morville. (2002). Chapter 9, “Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata” in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. (p ). Earley, S. (2005). Developing enterprise taxonomies. Early & Associates. Fitzgerald, Michael. “The Name Game: Tagging tools let users describe the world in their own terms as taxonomies become "folksonomies."” CIO Magazine, April 1, Deploying Microsoft's Enterprise Intranet Portal Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server Supplemental Burnett, K. (1999). A Comparison of the Two Traditions of Metadata Development. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(13), Zeng, M.L. (2005). Construction of controlled vocabularies: A primer. NISO. Montague Institute. (2001). Managing taxonomies strategically. Bryar, J.V. (2001). Taxonomies: The value of organized business knowledge. A White Paper Prepared for NewsEdge. Dick C.A. Bulterman, "Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?," IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 11, no. 4, pp ,