Having a website people can easily navigate is common sense. It can save taxpayer dollars and help your agency achieve its mission. Here’s how to dramatically improve your website by focusing on your customers’ needs and adopting some basic usability techniques.
Now that that has been said I can tell you the picky grumpy problems that I have with it :-) It’s so simplistic it obscures the reality that some of these tasks are hard and need specialists and real buy-in from all the members of the team. Their ROI calculations are ridiculous vague and if this is the kinda logic that our government uses I think I understand why we are in trouble.
Still it is very nice, well put together introduction that I think every government site owner should look at.
Paula Thornton (@rotkapchen) tweeted some great notes about Tagging and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 along with some valuable insight into deciding whether or not to pay for the FAST search license.
Materials being presented by Smartlogic, with product Semiphor — a taxonomy product integrated with FAST search.
Why are taxonomies needed? Terms have different meanings, is contextual. Expert vocabularies may not match search terms.
Terms may be in documents that are really irrelevant to the overall focus of the piece and would be meaningless results.
Taxonomy: Allows for capture of a domain knowledge, vocabulary and topical relationships. Ontology is multiple taxonomies.
Content as an asset should be organized/managed. Ontologies help with this (what’s missing, what are the relationships).
Ontologies can help support records management policies.
[Professional services firm Ascentium now presenting their experiences doing implementations w/2010 including inside MSoft
2010 has a utility Term Store Manager for facilitating taxonomical activities.
Concerns: Rely on users for taxonomies? Preferrably not, but allow them to add their own folksonomies.
Concerns: If you build a taxonomy, many companies are not willing to add staff to maintain and they must be maintained.
The manager is extensible, but there are challenges (running into while inside Microsoft via 'eat own dogfood' effort).
One primary goal: improve findability. Architecture of Term Store: Group, Term Set, Term
[search for blogs that deal with Term Store Manager -- they offer great advice]
[BTW Term Store Manager is still in beta and not yet generally released. Great steps forward, but one step back.]
[Showing UI. Have created two groups: fruits, vegetables. Adding tomato to both. Can 'borrow' but also have multi-terms]
[Have talked to Microsoft about the issues with disambiguation when multiple meanings are presented for a term.]
Added Term Set “vine” to house “tomato”. But have different Term Sets of Vine under Fruit and Vegetables. Different GUIDs
[Issue: Right now anyone with access can change definitions. Governance models needed to manage for disambiguation.]
[I'm still trying to figure out why they're going to all this effort when FAST does most of this automatically.]
[I'm guessing this is still 'brute force' version of SharePoint, which still requires 'brute force' search management
[The dropdown lists can get unwieldy because there is no description in the dropdowns, no way to know which term is which]
[Back to Smartlogic staff] Small or Large Ontology? Small: Easier to maintain, buckets larger, results less granular.
Asking users to self-tag against a really large taxonomy requires considerable effort (requires understanding of whole)
Companies restructure, change clients, add lines of business — all effects the total taxonomy (and existing content base)
In 2007 there were no real taxonomies available. Keywords are not the same thing. Results can be tuned via taxonomy.
Smartlogic now demoing Semaphore. The taxonomy is only half the equation. The content itself must have relevant metadata.
[Semaphore is totally integrated as an add-on to the SharePoint UI, as if it were simply utilities in SharePoint.]
Adding a document to SharePoint brings up the Semaphore UI for taxonomical additions, via ‘assisted’ tagging.
That is, there are recommendations made to which edits can be made. Effectively ‘automated’ with overrides.
This UI is useful for existing SharePoint stores to be reviewed and classified as well. [Again, only relevant w/o FAST]
[With this level of effort, I'm still trying to figure out why a company wouldn't pay for the FAST licenses instead?]
[Interesting navigation of topic maps and managing the 'collection' from the whole rather than the discrete elements.]
Semaphore Architecture: Allows for imports of existing structures and reorganized. Text mining and classification.
Rules-based approach used for classification server to make recommendations (rules can be tweaked).
Now talking about the FAST Server and explaining the greater control over the results, multi-content results, etc.
May 11th there will be another event to cover the FAST Server in more detail.
Q&A raised issues of cross-cultural-language issues for global taxonomies. See Motorola study http://twurl.nl/f3crub
Bottom line, assuming that you can get meaningful search results out of the box from SharePoint is erroneous.
So Canux 2009 has passed and I had a great time. Great conversations with old friends and new one and I even got to take my family to Banff this year. In past years I have tried to take notes of all the presentations but I am usually to enthralled to write down anything useful. This year is no exception. Here are my notes.
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information that I present will often be created by others and they would be the owners of that content, I do not presume any ownership of their content.
