- 1.Hybrid Approaches toTaxonomy & Folksonomy Semantic
Technology 2009 San Jose, CA June 17, 2009Richard Beatch Paul
Wlodarczyk Earley & Associates www.earley.com
2. Agenda
- The taxonomy/folksonomy debate
- Social tagging & the enterprise
- Hybrid approaches to taxonomy/folksonomy
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- Tag hierarchies/ontologies
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
3. About Earley & Associates
- Founded in 1994, Earley & Associates is an information
management (IM) consulting company specializing in
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- Taxonomy development and management
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- Content management strategy
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- Usability & Information Architecture
- Some of our recent clients include:
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- American Greetings, Hasbro, Ford Foundation, Astra Zeneca,
Motorola, The Hartford Insurance Group, Urban Land Institute
- Give us your business card
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- For a free pass to one of our Community of Practice conference
calls
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
4. About us
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- Senior Consultant at Earley & Associates, Inc.
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- Specialized in Taxonomy, Search, Metadata, and content
architecture.
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- Extensive industry experience leading the implementation and
design of taxonomies and search solutions for a range of companies
including Apple, McAfee, Allstate, Dell, and AT&T.
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- Blog: http://sethearley.wordpress.com/
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
5. About us
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- Director, Solutions Consulting at Earley & Associates,
Inc.
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- MBA with BA in Psychology / Cognitive Science
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- Specialized in unstructured content technologies with over 20
years experience in XML / structured authoring, content reuse, ECM,
KM, localization, semantic analysis and content enrichment
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- Blogs at http://sethearley.wordpress.com/ and
http://thecontentguy.net
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
6. The tired debate Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All
Rights Reserved Taxonomy Folksonomy Control Democracy Top-down
Bottom-up Arduous process Just do it Accurate Good enough
Restrictive Flexible Static Evolving Expensive to maintain Low cost
crowdsourced 7. The relevance problem
- Search results should be relevant to what a searcher wants, but
technology can only determine if it is relevant to a search
term*
- Taxonomies and folksonomies = 2 approaches to the problem of
relevance with common goal of describing content, each with
particular gaps
*Billy Cripe: Folksonomy, Keywords & Tags: Social &
Democratic User Interaction in Enterprise Content Management
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/content-management/pdf/OracleSocialTaggingWhitePaper.pdf
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 8.
Taxonomy
- Added by a small number of individuals: author/originators or
authorized persons (e.g.librarian)
- Describes meaning or purpose of content based on a set view
point for a specific audience using a controlled vocabulary
- Relationships between terms defined
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- Hierarchical (e.g. Computer hardware > Keyboard)
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- Associative (e.g. Computer hardware Software)
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- Equivalent (e.g. Laptop = Notebook Computer)
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
9. Tags
- Added by authors and consumers (individual motivation)
- Can connote any type of meaning or purpose
- No compression around a single viewpoint, no control of
vocabulary
- Self-correcting through volume
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
10. Why tagging is so interesting
- Adding individual value to the act of classification user
control over findability
- Reducing the cognitive burden(i.e. its easy)
- Reduced technologicalinvestment (i.e. its cheap)
- Can leverage emergentstructure (folksonomy)
Reno| Tags Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All
Rights Reserved 11. The downside
- Neither tags nor taggers are perfect
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- http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
Study: 40% of flickr tags and 28% of del.icio.us tags were
flawed in these ways Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc.
All Rights Reserved Misspellings Library vs. libary Plam pilot
Compound words TimBernersLee Case & number Folksonomy,
Folksonomies Personal tags To read My dog @work Single-use tags
Billybobsdog 12. The downside
- Varying levels of granularity
- Same tag, different meanings
- Lack of relationships between tags which is broader?
Narrower?
- Lack of consistency/approach to change even single user can
change language and hamper own personal retrieval
Robin Bird Turdus migratorinus Known as tag noise Copyright 2009
Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 13. The
downside
- Most tag search does not account for stemming, plurals,
etc.
E.g. Search on Delicious: Folksonomy: 16049 Folksonomies: 4404
Both: 2642 Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights
Reserved 14. The tagging hype cycle
http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2007/05/tag-history-and-gartners-hype-cycles.html
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 15.
The web vs. the enterprise
- Shirky: there is no shelf
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- Traditional organization schemes are built to deal with
physical collections and constraints.
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- They dont work well on the web
- The enterprise is much more defined
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- coordinated users, clear tasks
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- need for reliable retrieval
E.g. Flickr Delicious Social tagging works well in this context
Social tagging is more of a challenge, needs clear arena Copyright
2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 16. R o le of
folksonomy in the enterprise?
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- Seeing what colleagues are interested in
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- Sharing links with a specific team
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- Subscribing to link feeds
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- Monitoring news/blog coverage of the company
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- Consumer/competitor research
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- Finding/facilitating access to most popular pages on the
intranet
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- Seeing what intranet pages mean to staff
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
17. Role of folksonomy in the enterprise?
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- Identifying subject matter experts
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- Connecting people who share interests
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- Encouraging collaboration & resource sharing
- Improve your taxonomy, information retrieval
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- User tagging to refine the corporate taxonomy
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- Seeing what employees find interesting
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- Distributing tagging tasks
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
18. The downside
- Potential issues of security, inappropriateness
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- Can implement some level of vetting
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- Can be anonymous tagging, although this removes some social
value
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- Can create role or team-based collections
- Need higher ratio of active participants due to population
size
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
19. Message text External News Reports Discussion postings Links
Engineering document repositories Success Stories Policies Approved
Methods Best Practices Key concept:Not all content is created
equally The content continuum Copyright 2009 Earley &
Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved Lower Cost Higher Cost
Tagging/Organizing Processes Unfiltered Reviewed/Vetted/Approved
Lower Value Higher Value 20. What if we blended the two?
Low cost Findability Flexible Structured relationships User
terminology Oversight Social sharing Consistency Copyright 2009
Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 21. Hybrid
approaches Co-existence Tag-influenced taxonomy Taxonomy-influenced
tagging Tag hierarchies/ontologies Copyright 2009 Earley &
Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 22. Co-existence
- Taxonomy and folksonomy are used side by side
- Strengths of each approach preserved, philosophy of each kept
pure
Web example: Flickr & Library of
Congress:http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 23.
Co-existence Ann Arbor District Library Copyright 2009 Earley &
Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 24. Raytheon corporate
example
- Used in Raytheon employee portal - website lists (Suggested
sites feature box)
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- inserted Suggested Sites in a "feature" box to the right of the
regularly ranked results
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- website suggestions (URLs) submitted along with recommended
tags/keywords which are subsequently verified and approved by
librarians
http://www.slideshare.net/CJMConnors/i-kms-singapore-presentation
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 25.
Variation: Tag mediation
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- Weeds out potentially inappropriate tags
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- Eliminates misspellings, plural issues, etc.
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- Some can be done automatically (spell-checker, e.g.)
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
26. Tag-influenced taxonomy
- Taxonomy & tagging co-exist, tags serve as pool of
candidate terms to enrich taxonomy, keep it current
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- Find new terminology (synonyms, popular language)
- Performed as separateprocesses
(taxonomytagging=formal,tagging=informal) orcombined in
singleinterface
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
27. Tag-influenced taxonomy
- Requires formal vetting process
- Can be supported by automation (e.g. candidate tags pulled
& filtered with script to remove taxonomy terms, stop
words)
- Evaluate candidates based on
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- Frequency (literary warrant)
- Look at tags used in conjunction with taxonomy
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
28. Taxonomy-influenced tagging
- Presenting choices/suggestions to user from controlled set
ofterms/tags
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- Sometimes users prefer easy choice
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- influenced option to enter own tag? Good source of new
terms
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
29. WWW example: ZigTag Defined Tagging Definitions from Wikipedia
& Wordnet Tagging with type-ahead against database of 3M unique
concepts & 8M synonyms Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates
Inc. All Rights Reserved 30. Zigtag
- Type ahead & synonyms encourage consistency
- Synonyms based on Wikipedia, so can be dirty data
- No hierarchy, only equivalent relationships so far
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
31. Zigtag search Still get problems with uncontrolled tags &
recall Interesting relationships from Wikipedia Browse-able tag
cloud Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights
Reserved 32. Example: myedna (Education.au)
http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/tagging_hayman.ppt
Fully taxonomy-directed tagging Copyright 2009 Earley &
Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 33. TextWise Semantic Cloud
- Document (URL or text) is submitted to web service for semantic
analysis
- Category tags from subset of the ODP taxonomy
- Concept tags are derived from document, persisted, related to
ODP categories
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
1 3 2 34. Buzzillions.com
- Review site: tags are controlled not against a taxonomy, but
against other tags reduces redundancy
- Only popular tags exposed as faceted navigation
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
35. SharePoint?
- Plug-ins make taxonomy easy
- Present the taxonomy like tags
- E.g. KWizCom: plug-in manages taxonomy and tags in easy
interface can opt-out of letting users create own tags
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
36. Taxonomy-influenced tagging
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- Better support for findability
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- Relationships, definitions leveragedadding meaning to the
tags
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- Realistic for the enterprise
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- Not really folksonomy anymore..
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- Can be forcing terminology on user
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- Need to develop reference list of concepts manually through
taxonomy or need large corpus to derive automatically
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
37. Tag hierarchies
- Tag hierarchies come in two flavors:
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
38. User-powered tag hierarchies
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- Bogus hierarchies possible
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- Small population will contribute
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- Taggers could specify hierarchy in own account, tags clustered
based on common groups
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
39. User-poweredtag hierarchies
LibraryThing allows any use to combine (or uncombine) 2 tags
that are semantically equivalent. www.librarything.com Copyright
2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 40.
User-poweredtag hierarchies: Intelligent tags
- Move toward more semantic tagging with machine-readable tags,
e.g. Flickrmachine tagsin triple format:
[namespace]:[key]=[value]
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- geo:neighborhood=SoHo, geo:lat=58.41618, etc.
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- taxonomy:common=grevyszebra
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- makes your photo appear on a lastfm event page
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
41. User-poweredtag hierarchies: Intelligent tags
- MOAT: Meaning of a tag part of linked data movement, mapping
tags to semantic web
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- User resource tag meaning
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- Meaning = URI to a resource containing meaning (e.g.
DBPedia)
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
42. Automatically derived tag hierarchies
- Tag hierarchies, facets, ontologies, or folksontology
- Done through statistical/clustering algorithms
http://www.pui.ch/phred/automated_tag_clustering/ Copyright 2009
Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 43. Delicious
& citeulike hiearchy
http://heymann.stanford.edu/taghierarchy.html Copyright 2009 Earley
& Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 44. Clustering at flickr
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 45.
Auto clustering/facets
- Improve with volume(self-correcting)
http://www.pui.ch/phred/automated_tag_clustering/ Copyright 2009
Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 46. Tag hierarchy
pros and cons
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- Relationships, definitionsleveragedadding meaning to the
tags
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- Provides a basis for application behavior in the absence of
taxonomy (e.g. Flickr maps, clusters)
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- Self-correcting with volume
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- Automatically derived relationships (clusters) can be bogus or
time-sensitive
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- Folksonomic relationships can be esoteric (just like tags)
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- Small population of contributors
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
47. Conclusion
- Not all content is created equal tags and taxonomies have their
sweet spots
- Hybrid approaches are emerging
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- taxonomy-influenced tagging leading the pack in popularity on
the web
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- co-existence in the enterprise
- Look for more developments on the semantic web/linked data
front for making tags more intelligent
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
48. Questions? Richard Beatch[email_address] Paul Wlodarczyk
[email_address] Web :www.earley.com Blog : sethearley.wordpress.com
Twitter :earleytaxonomy Give us your business card for a free pass
to one of our Community of Practice conference calls (a $50 value).
49. Appendix: Corporate social tagging tools 50. Corporate social
tagging software http://www.connectbeam.com/ Copyright 2009 Earley
& Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 51. Corporate social
tagging software http://www.cogenz.com/ Copyright 2009 Earley &
Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 52. Corporate social tagging
software
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/dogear.html
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 53.
Corporate social tagging software
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http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.jsp&FP=/content/products/aqualogic/pathways/
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
54. Corporate social tagging software
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- http://www.newsgator.com/business/socialsites/default.aspx
Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights
Reserved