Creating and Using Dynamic Topic Maps to Visualize your Business Environment

● Workshop held at SCIP 2014 European Summit, Amsterdam

● Monday 7 November, 13:30-16:30 ● Facilitators: Jesper Martell, CEO, Comintelli Christian Bjersér, SVP, Comintelli

Penny Crossman

“Finding a piece of information within a large collection of data without a taxonomy is like

driving in unknown territory without the benefit of a map or road signs.”

Agenda

● Introduction to Taxonomies (20 min) ● Workshop Exercise (60-80 min) ● Break (10 min) ● Presentation by groups (40 min) ● Break (10 min) ● Summary & Conclusions (20-30 min) ● Best Practice Examples (10 min)

1. Introduction to Taxonomies

What is a Topic Map / Taxonomy?

● A word that few people use or have

heard of....

● Basically, a way to group things together in a systematic way.

● Often used in biology to classify plants and animals

The Origin of Taxonomies “The first step of science is to know one thing from another. This knowledge consists in their specific distinctions; but in order that it may be fixed and permanent distinct names must be given to different things, and those names must be recorded and remembered” - Carl Linnaeus, 18th century Swedish biologist

The Business Taxonomy

● Classification tool for Information Access

● The names for the different groupings in a taxonomy are called topics.

● Using groupings of cars as an example, we might call one group “Ford", and another group “Volvo". “Ford" and “Volvo" are topics in our taxonomy.

A systematic and logic structure of topics that supports users

when categorizing and navigating business information.

Taxonomies versus Folders

● Storing on LAN/shared servers ● Only allows you to store

your documents in ONE folder

● Colleagues can only access the document if they know exactly where you stored it

● Storing in e-mail folders ● Mostly personal – not shared ● When shared – colleagues must

know exactly where you put it.

● Modern taxonomies ● Your documents will be

linked to ALL relevant topics

● Colleagues can access your information via all topics connected to a document

● Shared!

Manual versus Automatic

● Manual tagging and classification of information has been done for a long time.

● Today organizations are classifying articles automatically using software instead of human judgment.

● Once the computer decides the appropriate topics to add, those topics are attached to the article’s metadata.

Benefits of Taxonomies

● Speed up and improve “findability” of both

documents and expertise.

● Uses people’s natural instinct to structure information.

● Facilitate both manual and automatic classification of documents.

● Automatic classification is

● Less subjective, more consistent & reliable

● Possible to handle much larger volumes

● Highlighting what information is important to the organization, reflects the industry

● Unifies corporate language, standardizes the terminology in the company

7 Steps to Creating the Taxonomy

● Iterative process that can take months… ● Should not include all topics users might want, but a cross-

selection of the key topics to aid in navigation

2. Workshop Exercise

Yesterday, I didn't even know how to spell taxonomy, and now I need to make one…

Workshop Exercise

● Divide into 3 industry tables ● Beer ● Fast Food ● Airlines

● Define scope ● Create a simple topic map for your scope!

● Max 10 first level and 3 levels deep

● Manually on paper w post its ● Normally use a digital Mind Mapping tool

like MindJet

3. Presentation of Findings

4. Insights & Conclusions

What is a Good Taxonomy?

● One That Satisfies User Information Needs...

● Our Experiences: ● What is the purpose of the taxonomy? ● Often have too many topics, try to

cover too much ● Liberate yourself from folders! ● Define a topic carefully using search

rules and queries ● Dynamic to reflect changing business

environment, ● Constantly validating and checking

● How populate them with relevant sources and content?

Best practice examples

Example: AP News Taxonomy

● In 2006, the AP developed its taxonomy for internal use. Automated tagging began the following year to categorize content coming through the “pipeline” from AP journalists, AP members and third parties.

● Contains more than: ● 4,200 subjects, ● 2,200 geographic locations, ● 2,400 organizations, ● 106,000 people ● 50,000 publicly-traded companies.

● Each day the AP receives

approximately 100,000 pieces of content and automatically applies and publishes metadata directly to every item.

Example: Automotive Market Taxonomy

Example: CI Taxonomy

Source: Kieran Michael Brown using Mindmeister / MindJet

Creating and Using Dynamic Topic Maps to Visualize your Business Environment

● Thank you for your attention!

● Jesper Martell, CEO, Comintelli ● E-mail: jesper.martell@comintelli.com ● Twitter: @JesperMartell

● Christian Bjersér, SVP, Comintelli ● E-mail: christian.bjerser@comintelli.com