How do you "sell" business unit managers,
senior executives, and authors on the value of taxonomies? This article
looks at the issue from two perspectives — corporate IT and commercial
publishing. By focusing on technology, the IT perspective makes it difficult
to "sell" taxonomy benefits. By focusing on information products,
the commercial publishing perspective makes it possible to assign a
dollar value to the whole package, in which taxonomy plays a part. Neither
perspective, however, gives enough emphasis to how people actually use
information — the key to productivity and business value.
Annotated links to current articles and interesting
Web sites. This month's entry is an opinion piece on the free vs.
fee issue, "The twilight of the information middlemen."
Knowledge base editing retreat November 8 - 12 (Amherst,
MA)
Five days of hands-on activities covering 5 topics
— trends, creating quality content, basic taxonomies, advanced
taxonomies, application integration.
Taxonomy maintenance June 22/23 (Enfield, CT)
Corporate taxonomies are not static structures.
They need to be continually updated due to new content, organizational
changes, and new business strategies. This two day workshop will define
the issues associated with taxonomy maintenance and will help you develop
a change control process that is customized to meet the needs of your
organization. Includes hands-on activities with Web-based Lab.
A hands-on course that covers the fundamentals of
business taxonomies: how to do a needs analysis, create a controlled
vocabulary, develop a thesaurus, and use taxonomy components in navigation.
Includes personalized assistance from our instructors and supervised
work on a real project in the Web-based Lab.
A hands-on course that covers the creation and use
of authorities as well as the development of two independent thesauri
that are linked through cross references. Includes personalized assistance
from our instructors and supervised work on a real project in the Web-based
Lab.
