1. Building taxonomies from the ground-up Prakash Govindarajulu Managing Consultant RealTech Inc prakashgovind@realtechinc.com 781-883-8338

2. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy and Semantics Why taxonomies? How can they influence semantics? Bottom-up methodology for building them Search Taxonomy Semantic System

3. RealTech Inc. P2P Communication – inherent semantics Richness of Dialog, opportunity to: -Clarify context - Clarify query - Refine query - Answer if known

4. RealTech Inc. The Semantic Problem Information Systems The semantic problem: - Knowledge representation - Capturing domain expertise - Accessing knowledge without loss of richness of dialog

5. RealTech Inc. Terminology: data, information, knowledge  Data: any fact  Metadata/Information: the act or fact of informing.  Data about data  Provides context  Relationship with other data objects  Knowledge: the fact or state of knowing; the perception of fact or truth  Interpreted data, “understands” data and information to refine or fulfil a query  Experiential data Data Metadata Knowledge

6. RealTech Inc. “Knowledge” Representation Today Systems With Data (documents, Database Wikis blogs) Information Access Systems (Search)

7. RealTech Inc. Search – Yet Another Index? Systems With Data (documents, database) Information Access Systems (Search) Index

8. RealTech Inc. Challenges Systems With Data (documents, database) Information Access Systems (Search)  User’s perspective is not well understood  Search relevancy therefore suffers  How can related information be presented?  Solution approach: Taxonomy Index

9. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy anyone? From digg.com 6/8/07

10. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy – Classification Classification: Categories & Subcategories

11. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy – Guided Navigation Perspectives or Facets

12. RealTech Inc. Building Taxonomy – the Human Element Systems With Data (documents, database) System With Metadata (Taxonomy) Information Access Systems (Search) Human Element ConsensusGovernance

13. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy Guidelines …1 System with Metadata – Taxonomy Management System Human Element - Audience: Know thy user for they are not Thee - Harmony of Purpose - Communication Listening Understanding Consensus vs majority - Metadata for data - Metadata for metadata - Governance

14. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy Guidelines …2 System with Metadata – Taxonomy Management System Human Element Jerusalem Artichokes The OTHER Category Courtesy: Wikipedia

15. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy Guidelines …3 System with Metadata – Taxonomy Management System Human Element Defining relationships among metadata and data elements: First step toward semantics Vehicle Manufactured-in CITY EMISSION RULES Applies-To Observed-In

16. RealTech Inc. Taxonomy Guidelines …4 System with Metadata – Taxonomy Management System Human Element - Knowledge worker Participation - Buy-in from management - Buy-in from other affected departments

17. RealTech Inc. TaxoConsolidator Master Taxonomy Source 1Source 2 TaxoConsolidator allows user to create a Master taxonomy by combining (adding and merging through dragndrop) individual taxonomies created by knowledge workers Courtesy: RealTechInc

18. RealTech Inc. Wordmap – Taxonomy Management System Creating and maintaining taxonomies Using Wordmap Courtesy: Earley & Associates

19. RealTech Inc. Moving toward semantics Understand your audience Define the domain of problems clearly Need for robust representation of data, information in that domain Involve all relevant knowledge workers Create a taxonomy – with metadata and relationships Expose and use the taxonomy in systems enterprise wide Need for a flexible rules and inference engines to interpret data and discover related “knowledge”

20. RealTech Inc. Next Steps toward semantics Enterprise Systems (documents, database) Taxonomy Mangement System (Taxonomy) Information Access Systems (Search) Human Element Rules Inference Engines (Semantic Interpreter)

21. RealTech Inc. New Tools for Taxonomy New Tools - TaxoBuilder – term extraction tool and individual taxonomy construction tool -TaxoConsolidator – consolidates individual taxonomies -Wordmap from E&A

22. RealTech Inc. Summary Search and understanding user request through query semantics Represent your information through taxonomies as a fulcrum for all information management in enterprise Build semantic interpreters of relationships and metadata to complement search