Integrating enterprise and specialized taxonomies

October, 2000

by Mike Crandall, formerly Knowledge Architecture Manager, Microsoft. Currently working at the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation

In this article, Mike discusses how Microsoft uses XML as a low cost way to give internal departments and business units ("sub-portal owners") access to the company's enterprise taxonomy -- and use specialized local taxonomies to enrich the enterprise search facility. Our comments are indented or [in brackets].

Last month, I discussed the separation of the search and browse taxonomies in Microsoft’s distributed intranet environment (see "Two taxonomies are better than one "). The advantage of that separation was in the divorce of local navigation from enterprise-wide information retrieval, which allowed sub-portal owners to build their own set of site categories, while still taking advantage of a centralized search service utilizing common search vocabularies.

To accomplish this, we needed to abstract the various components of our enterprise search offering and design a service around them that could be supported without an increase in staffing. One of the key requirements of this service was that any code changes should be invisible to the sub-portals using the search service, since we didn’t have resources to run a traditional versioned software application requiring reinstalls when new releases were made.

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