Although tagging and the folksonomy the tags create have interested me, I have a hard time figuring out how they would work inside a law firm.
Sure it would be great to allow users to add tags to pages on our intranet or other web-based applications. It would also be valuable to compile tags for external websites that would be useful to the practice.
But the vast majority of our knowledge artifacts are documents in our Interwoven Worksite document management system. Interwoven does not have a way to tag. If I can't tag my documents, then I might as well not have enterprise tags at all.
Sure, you can add comments and profile fields to the document in Interwoven. But that is not the same thing. Since you can only have one profile, you can only have one tag set per document. You also do not get the attribution. If I do not know who made the tag, I am less likely to rely on it. The tag has much more value when you know who made it.
Collecting and displaying tags by person then turns the tags into a person's expertise and areas of interest. If you look at my Del.icio.us tags you can see what I found interesting. My tags are in the lower right corner of the website.
One of the interesting tools that Vivisimo has apparently packaged with the new release of its Velocity search tool is the ability to tag documents in Worksite. Actually, it should give you the ability to tag any knowledge artifact in any system you connect to the Vivisimo enterprise search tool.
The tagging in Vivisimo gives you ability to enhance the findability of the knowledge artifacts inside the law firm and find out more about the people inside the law firm.
Showing posts with label folksonomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label folksonomy. Show all posts
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Knowledge Management and Organization
Way back in June, I sat through (and enjoyed) a presentation by David Weinberger at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As a result I put his book, Everything is Miscellaneous on my reading list. Having just finished reading the book, I was pleased to stumble across a video of his presentation.
It is great presentation and book to provoke thought about how you organize your knowledge. If you have a free hour, watch the whole video. If you only have a few minutes, watch the first few minutes.
It is great presentation and book to provoke thought about how you organize your knowledge. If you have a free hour, watch the whole video. If you only have a few minutes, watch the first few minutes.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Intranet Navigation
An intranet is one of the foundation tools for a knowledge management program. We are currently working on the redesign of our SharePoint intranet. This will be our third generation intranet using SharePoint. The redesign team has spent a great deal of time discussing navigation on the intranet.
I have come to the realization that most users want to be able to navigate and browse to their desired content on the intranet. This seems contrary to the internet where most people are comfortable searching for content. I think there are two reasons. First, intranet searches (ours included) have been notoriously bad, by not searching enough repositories and not presenting the search results in a coherent way. Second, users treat the intranet like any other application where they click action buttons to get the information they need.
Users should be using the intranet to help answer a question. So a well designed intranet should be setup to help the user answer their question. This means organizing content content solely around business units (for a law firm practice areas or administrative departments) is not the most useful way to organize the intranet.
We decided to have some organization on the intranet organized around typical tasks. We worked with focus groups and card-sorting exercises to layout a top level and secondary navigation. There was a lack of agreement on where some items should be in the navigational scheme. It seems everyone had different way of thinking about how content should be grouped.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
. He makes a compelling case that an item need not be in a single location when dealing with digital content. The book also shed a lot of light on why people have different ways of wanting to group the intranet content.
Along this same idea, Bob Mixon posted on MOSS 2007 Site Navigation - Topical Versus Organizational and Getting More from the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). He indicates that you can get the best of both worlds in SharePoint, organizing content by business group and by topic. This technique seems like it will be able to give the business groups the ability to manage and update their information, but repackage it and make it available to different user groups in different ways.
I have come to the realization that most users want to be able to navigate and browse to their desired content on the intranet. This seems contrary to the internet where most people are comfortable searching for content. I think there are two reasons. First, intranet searches (ours included) have been notoriously bad, by not searching enough repositories and not presenting the search results in a coherent way. Second, users treat the intranet like any other application where they click action buttons to get the information they need.
Users should be using the intranet to help answer a question. So a well designed intranet should be setup to help the user answer their question. This means organizing content content solely around business units (for a law firm practice areas or administrative departments) is not the most useful way to organize the intranet.
We decided to have some organization on the intranet organized around typical tasks. We worked with focus groups and card-sorting exercises to layout a top level and secondary navigation. There was a lack of agreement on where some items should be in the navigational scheme. It seems everyone had different way of thinking about how content should be grouped.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
. He makes a compelling case that an item need not be in a single location when dealing with digital content. The book also shed a lot of light on why people have different ways of wanting to group the intranet content.Along this same idea, Bob Mixon posted on MOSS 2007 Site Navigation - Topical Versus Organizational and Getting More from the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). He indicates that you can get the best of both worlds in SharePoint, organizing content by business group and by topic. This technique seems like it will be able to give the business groups the ability to manage and update their information, but repackage it and make it available to different user groups in different ways.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Connectbeam Redux – Tagging Appliance for the Enterprise
As a follow up to my post on Connectbeam, Chuck Pendell VP of Sales and Puneet Gupta CEO and Founder of Connectbeam spent some time showing me their product in more detail.
They are positioning the product as a social software application for information access and discovery. The goal is to provide good content by adding attributes to make the information more useful. It ends up being a blend of del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn within the enterprise.
The Connectbeam appliance combines social bookmarking with social networking. It uses bookmarking as a proxy for expertise and information interest. So if I have a bunch of bookmarks on "knowledge management," I presumably have some expertise in knowledge management or at least have some interest in knowledge management. The product is an appliance so it should be easy to deploy and setup. It allows each user to import bookmarks from del.icio.us or a web browser. When you add a bookmark, you can decide to make it open, publish it to an open community, publish it to a restricted community or keep it private. They provide a toolbar with the button to create the bookmark and add the tags.
They also allow an integration into an internet and/or intranet search. Then the tagging from Connectbeam is combined with the search results. In the demo they used their Google appliance search, combining intranet and internet web search into a single result set. The bookmarked websites with the tags that matched the search terms were presented first in the search results, pushing those sites that were bookmarked the most to the top of the search results.
The community aspect of Connectbeam allows you to create ad hoc communities that are either open or restricted. I could create a community for my knowledge management team and publish bookmarks to that community. I could keep the community open so that anyone in firm interested in knowledge management could see the bookmarks published to that community. Or I could keep it restricted so that only certain invited people could join the community and see that community of bookmarks and their tags.
Connectbeam associates each person's bookmarks and communities and produces a user profile based on that information. I really like the concept of the tagging information being added into the profile for a person.
I see a tremendous value in adding the bookmarks and tags to enhance search results. It is a great way to cull out good content. If someone went through the trouble of bookmarking and tagging a site, it has some higher value for them. By combining multiple users bookmarks and tags, the better content bubbles to the top of the search results. In return, each person has a catalog of their bookmarks to browse and search through.
With Connectbeam the bookmarking and tagging enhance the findability of information used by the enterprise and the findability of expertise within the enterprise.
The weakness of the Connectbeam system is that it relies on bookmarking. Therefore you need a discoverable, unique URL to create the bookmark. For my firm, that ends up leaving out our document management system. Without being able to pull in documents it ends up not being a good solution for my firm. Maybe they can create an integration with Interwoven, but in the meantime the value proposition for Connectbeam is less apparent for my firm.
They are positioning the product as a social software application for information access and discovery. The goal is to provide good content by adding attributes to make the information more useful. It ends up being a blend of del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn within the enterprise.
The Connectbeam appliance combines social bookmarking with social networking. It uses bookmarking as a proxy for expertise and information interest. So if I have a bunch of bookmarks on "knowledge management," I presumably have some expertise in knowledge management or at least have some interest in knowledge management. The product is an appliance so it should be easy to deploy and setup. It allows each user to import bookmarks from del.icio.us or a web browser. When you add a bookmark, you can decide to make it open, publish it to an open community, publish it to a restricted community or keep it private. They provide a toolbar with the button to create the bookmark and add the tags.
They also allow an integration into an internet and/or intranet search. Then the tagging from Connectbeam is combined with the search results. In the demo they used their Google appliance search, combining intranet and internet web search into a single result set. The bookmarked websites with the tags that matched the search terms were presented first in the search results, pushing those sites that were bookmarked the most to the top of the search results.
The community aspect of Connectbeam allows you to create ad hoc communities that are either open or restricted. I could create a community for my knowledge management team and publish bookmarks to that community. I could keep the community open so that anyone in firm interested in knowledge management could see the bookmarks published to that community. Or I could keep it restricted so that only certain invited people could join the community and see that community of bookmarks and their tags.
Connectbeam associates each person's bookmarks and communities and produces a user profile based on that information. I really like the concept of the tagging information being added into the profile for a person.
I see a tremendous value in adding the bookmarks and tags to enhance search results. It is a great way to cull out good content. If someone went through the trouble of bookmarking and tagging a site, it has some higher value for them. By combining multiple users bookmarks and tags, the better content bubbles to the top of the search results. In return, each person has a catalog of their bookmarks to browse and search through.
With Connectbeam the bookmarking and tagging enhance the findability of information used by the enterprise and the findability of expertise within the enterprise.
The weakness of the Connectbeam system is that it relies on bookmarking. Therefore you need a discoverable, unique URL to create the bookmark. For my firm, that ends up leaving out our document management system. Without being able to pull in documents it ends up not being a good solution for my firm. Maybe they can create an integration with Interwoven, but in the meantime the value proposition for Connectbeam is less apparent for my firm.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Social Bookmarking Applications and Knowledge Management
Dave Geeenfield posted this article on eWeek: Social Bookmarking Apps Provide a New Knowledge Management Platform.
He looked at products from
He also points out that Sharepoint does not have a social bookmarking feature. But, there are some third party add-ons.
He found a big disparity in pricing for the products:
He looked at products from
- BEA Systems BEA AquaLogic Pathways 1.0
http://en.terpri.se/alpathways/demo/demo.html - Cogenz Cogenz Enterprise Edition 1.0
https://eweek.cogenz.net/ - Connectbeam Connectbeam Application
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZAwwjm2BEQ - IBM Lotus IBM Lotus Connections 1.0 http://demos.dfw.ibm.com/on_demand/Streamed/IBM_Demo_Lotus_Connections-1-Mar07.html
He also points out that Sharepoint does not have a social bookmarking feature. But, there are some third party add-ons.
He found a big disparity in pricing for the products:
- IBM - $110 per user
- BEA - $64 per user
- Connectbeam - $20 per user
- Cogenz - $12 per user
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
The crew at Common Craft have not taken the summer off. They have just released a new instructional video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English. It is great take on how to use Del.icio.us.
They break social bookmarking down into three steps:
1. Sign up at delicious
2. Start tagging sites
3. Look at other's bookmarks
They break social bookmarking down into three steps:
1. Sign up at delicious
2. Start tagging sites
3. Look at other's bookmarks
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Topic Maps
In response to my post on taxonomies and folksonomies, Matt Hodgson offered a solution of topic maps as a way to deal with the unstructured chaos that comes along with folksonomies.
I have been looking at a similar approach of leveraging topic maps in my search for an enterprise search engine. Products like Recommind are able to create a relationship among words and phrases in a document and equate them as synonyms. So when you search for a "P & S" the search engine will return a "purchase and sale agreement", "sale agreement", and "purchase agreement" as well as a"P&S."
The next step is to get them to recognize the folksonomy tags and create relationships among them as well as the words in the document. Effectively, the folksonomy tag would be just another piece of metadata for the document.
I have been looking at a similar approach of leveraging topic maps in my search for an enterprise search engine. Products like Recommind are able to create a relationship among words and phrases in a document and equate them as synonyms. So when you search for a "P & S" the search engine will return a "purchase and sale agreement", "sale agreement", and "purchase agreement" as well as a"P&S."
The next step is to get them to recognize the folksonomy tags and create relationships among them as well as the words in the document. Effectively, the folksonomy tag would be just another piece of metadata for the document.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Taxonomies and Folksonomies
Matt Hodgson has three posts on taxonomies, folk taxonomies and Folksonomies.
I have struggled with trying incorporate taxonomies into our work product retrieval and precedent storage systems. It has been difficult to create anything that exists beyond a single practice area. As Matt highlights in his post, taxonomies create a one-size-fits-all approach that may be comprehensive, but it is hard to get all of the concepts in place. As the taxonomy gets bigger it just makes it harder for the user to find topics and harder to file items into the taxonomy.
We have implemented a tool that auto-categorizes documents: West KM. It does an excellent job of categorizing substantive legal memos into the West key system. But is it worth the effort? In our analysis, users start with search terms. Very few browse through the categories. I also find the west taxonomy to be lacking in depth in many areas.
Folksonomies are intriguing to me, because they put categorization in the users hands (for better or worse). I have become a big fan of del.icio.us (you can see my tags).
Folksonomies have a lot of flaws. Just take a look at the most popular tags on Del.icio.us. "video" and "videos" are two separate entries.
What really intrigues me about folksonomies is being able to include them as part of the metadata for an enterprise search. As we have experienced with WestKM, most users will start with a search. If the tags allow us to manipulate the rankings of documents it could make the enterprise search engine more powerful and useful.
I assume the enterprise search engine will use stemming and other techniques to eliminate the noise of the "video" and "videos" tags.
I have struggled with trying incorporate taxonomies into our work product retrieval and precedent storage systems. It has been difficult to create anything that exists beyond a single practice area. As Matt highlights in his post, taxonomies create a one-size-fits-all approach that may be comprehensive, but it is hard to get all of the concepts in place. As the taxonomy gets bigger it just makes it harder for the user to find topics and harder to file items into the taxonomy.
We have implemented a tool that auto-categorizes documents: West KM. It does an excellent job of categorizing substantive legal memos into the West key system. But is it worth the effort? In our analysis, users start with search terms. Very few browse through the categories. I also find the west taxonomy to be lacking in depth in many areas.
Folksonomies are intriguing to me, because they put categorization in the users hands (for better or worse). I have become a big fan of del.icio.us (you can see my tags).
Folksonomies have a lot of flaws. Just take a look at the most popular tags on Del.icio.us. "video" and "videos" are two separate entries.
What really intrigues me about folksonomies is being able to include them as part of the metadata for an enterprise search. As we have experienced with WestKM, most users will start with a search. If the tags allow us to manipulate the rankings of documents it could make the enterprise search engine more powerful and useful.
I assume the enterprise search engine will use stemming and other techniques to eliminate the noise of the "video" and "videos" tags.
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