1. Metadata Strategies Alternatives for creating value from metadata Tom Reamy Chief Knowledge Architect KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com

2. 2 Agenda  To Metadata or not to Metadata  Issues and Approaches to Metadata  Infrastructure Solution – Metadata Contexts – Tools – People  Why an infrastructure Solution? – Decreasing cost and increasing value  Conclusion

3. 3 Metadata about Metadata: Two Sources  Global Corporate Circle DCMI 2003 Workshop – Importance of Metadata – Difficulty of implementation and justification http://dublincore.org/groups/corporate/Seattle  KAPS Group Experience – Consulting, Taxonomy & Metadata, Strategy – Knowledge architecture audit – Partners – Inxight, Convera, etc. – Intellectual infrastructure for organizations Knowledge organization, technology, people and processes Search, CM, portals, collaboration, KM, e-learning, etc

4. 4 To Metadata or not to Metadata That is the Question  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous search results  Or to take up metadata against a sea of irrelevance  And by organizing them find them?  Why not Metadata? – Costly - $200K to set up, maintenance costs – Difficult to do Missing, incorrect, confusing, inconsistent Poor quality metadata can make search worse

5. 5 To Metadata or not to Metadata That is the Question  Why Metadata?  Metadata is expensive – only if unique job every time  Not metadata is even more expensive? – $8,200 per employee per year – IDC – 1,000 people - $2.5 mil a year lost  Need more sophisticated ROI – Saved time per search – Easy to measure, hard to believe – Use relative not absolute numbers 60 people years for metadata for 1 million documents 6,000 people years to write = 1% – Regulatory and Legal requirements – Stories – business needs, improvements

6. 6 Metadata Issues and Approaches: Alternatives  Metadata, we don’t need no stinking metadata – Condemned to wander search results lists forever – Need to answer these people  KA Team – Consultants – Costly, Still need to maintain  Automatic metadata (clustering & categorization) – Uneven, poor quality  Author generated metadata – Uneven quality, inconsistent – Cultural – getting authors to want to do it

7. 7 Metadata Issues and Approaches: Alternatives Content Value Tiers - Rosenfeld  Different levels of metadata for different documents – Not too much, not too little, just right  High value documents get full metadata, others less  Criteria: authority, strategic value, popularity, currency, reusability  Practical solution, 80-20 rule, focus on business value  BUT – doesn’t answer how to do metadata, simply limits problem  AND – adds some new problems

8. 8 Metadata Issues and Approaches: Alternatives Content Value Tiers - Rosenfeld  Who decides what is good content? – Publishers, Authors, KA Team – Political and Quality Issues  Objective – metrics of use – Popularity is not high value – High impact if not found – Who decides which measure to use?  Authority, popularity, etc. are metadata – Almost as much effort to decide what is good as add metadata  Points in the right direction – multiple approaches

9. 9 Infrastructure Solutions: The Right Context  No one solution – Can’t answer content questions from perspective of content alone – need to understand users and activities and organization  Context – understanding your context – Match amount of metadata to value – Match type of metadata to content and use – Lower the cost and increase the value  The problem is not that metadata initiatives have been too complex, it’s been that they have been too simple. – Metadata is more than adding keywords as an afterthought  For same or less effort, you can go from metadata that makes search worse to a set of solutions

10. 10 Infrastructure Solutions: The Right Context  Content – structured & unstructured, external & internal  Taxonomies, Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies – Standards, best practices  Publishing Policy and Procedures  Technologies – search, portals, CM, applications  People – Central Team and Subject matter experts – Communities of users and information behaviors  Business processes and requirements

11. 11 Infrastructure Solutions: Metadata Contexts  Why are you adding metadata? – Ranking for Retrieval – lower value – Context – dynamic browse, multiple views – Get content to users - agents  Metadata Standards – matching the level and unit of organization, – Paragraph – XML, RDF – High value, training – Document – Titles, keywords – Collection – Publisher, Functions – Facets, low cost Documents into metadata

12. 12 Infrastructure Solutions: Metadata Contexts  Keywords – most difficult Common terms, unique terms, aboutness terms Need to do it right and completely to get real value  Keywords - Need Taxonomy, Controlled Vocabulary – Enhance quality, consistency – Supports author generated metadata  Value from all fields – Titles and Descriptions – Balance of system and description – Publisher and Author – Automated and easy – DocumentType – FAQ’s, Policy Doc – support user behavior – Audience – target information, agents – variety of app’s Purpose per Audience

13. 13 Infrastructure Solutions: Tools  Content Management – the right place for adding metadata – Metadata generation - Keywords within a taxonomy – Take advantage of automation, rules, work flow – Hybrid and Distributed  Tools for central team – Unstructured Data management, Visualization KA Team reduced costs, improved quality  Applications – Search, Portals, CRM, Text Mining – Need to be able to integrate and apply metadata – Analytics based on meaning, metadata – Faceted search results – high value (Marti Hearst)

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15. 15 Example

16. 16 Infrastructure Solutions: People  Central Team supported by software and offering services – Creating, acquiring, evaluating taxonomies, metadata standards, vocabularies – Input into technology decisions and design – content management, portals, search – Socializing the benefits of metadata, creating a content culture – Evaluating metadata quality, facilitating author metadata – Analyzing the results of using metadata, how communities are using – Research metadata theory, user centric metadata – Design content value structure – more nuanced than good / poor content.

17. 17 Infrastructure Solutions: Why?  Needed to implement any alternative approach – Justification for metadata - measure and present realistic ROI – Supplement consultants – Integrate automated and author supplied metadata – Integrate content tiers into broader context  Needed for tailoring solutions to organizations  Metadata as add on to a search engine purchase will fail  Most cost effective way to produce valuable metadata  Needed to support variety of cognitive behaviors – Monkey, Panda, Banana

18. 18 Infrastructure Solutions: Why?  Decrease the cost of creating metadata – Tools and Processes Content management, categorization and visualization software Large batch of legacy content Spread the cost – automation, author, central team – Leverage intellectual infrastructure elements – taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, metadata standards – Increase cost of not adding metadata – policy and culture, but support with software

19. 19 Infrastructure Solutions: Why?  Increase the value of creating metadata – Better quality metadata Categorization experts and subject matter experts – Beyond Search and relevance ranking Multiple facets – contextual, entity, concept, document type Dynamic classification – intersection of 2 subjects Applications – integrated metadata for portals, agents, etc Personalization by categorization – Beyond content – people metadata: Community personalization, information behaviors Community categorization

20. 20 Infrastructure Solutions: What if I can’t get there from here?  First Step – Create an infrastructure strategic vision – Including metadata standards  KA Team – can be part time, needs official recognition  Content Management is essential  Don’t start with keywords  Buy or develop taxonomies, controlled vocabularies  Relevance ranking as last resort – Best bet metadata – Browse and dynamic classifications – Faceted Displays  Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast

21. 21 Conclusion  You wouldn’t run a company without organizing your employees and computers, why think you can create information access without organizing your information?  More metadata, not less.  Better Metadata – Better metadata system – Better values in fields – Better value from metadata – Better processes for creating metadata

22. Questions? Tom Reamy tomr@kapsgroup.com KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com