Is Your Taxonomy Intelligent?
Information taxonomy is a powerful tool that is often not given its due importance – reasons are abound for this. Here are the typical challenges in managing a taxonomy:
Building the taxonomy
The challenge begins right at the beginning. Information officers are often grappling with discovering the right taxonomy for their business and organization. A deep understanding of the nature of the business is critical in creating a meaningful taxonomy structure. Often, an industry standard taxonomy is applied with minimal customizations to suit the organization.
Taxonomy should be created to represent the content; content should not be created to fit into a taxonomy. This basic premise gets overlooked often. Your content has been created by your users and holds intelligence worth a goldmine. The right place to start deriving your taxonomy is your current content.
However, until now, this was practically difficult to achieve. Due to the sheer volume of data involved, it is humanly not possible to analyze your current content to arrive at the taxonomy that the users are sub-consciously using. With big data and AI/ML technologies now being at the forefront, this is changing.
Acuvate Lexico is an AI-driven bot that can analyze all your current unstructured content and come up with relevant taxonomy recommendations. These can be juxtaposed with the industry taxonomies to achieve best of both worlds.
Evolving taxonomy
As the taxonomy starts to get used, it needs to evolve. Remember that your users are human beings – their needs, and your business needs evolve. And the taxonomy needs to evolve accordingly. A user might prefer different synonyms to the terms configured in your taxonomy; a new business line might spring up warranting an upgrade of your taxonomy; an existing service line might get upgraded; hundreds of new documents with new content get created every day. In today’s dynamic business environment, the possibilities are endless.
It is, again, humanly impossible to keep track of all changes in users’ language culture and the business dynamics. Gradually the taxonomy gets outdated and useless. Dark data starts to build gradually, eventually creating a content rut.
Acuvate Lexico continuously scans your content, understands it, tags it, and provides you the right recommendations for your taxonomy. Lexico gives you deep analytics on your content so that you can decide if you should replace an existing term with its widely-used synonym.
You can also identify if a taxonomy term has not been used in the past year, hence making it redundant, or recognize users who are tagging their documents with PII tag (Personally Identifiable Information). You may even uncover completely new taxonomy terms. With Lexico, your taxonomy becomes a living and breathing entity, and not just a static tree-structure.
Multiple content management systems (CMS)
Often enterprises’ content is spread across multiple content management systems, especially documents. This is a major hindrance in creating a taxonomy, as a single structure doesn’t apply to all the content systems.
Lexico helps you overcome this and creates a unified taxonomy structure. With Lexico’s plugin architecture, any CMS can be added to the Lexico cluster with analysis running on the cluster. You can then replicate the taxonomy in all of your CMS systems. If you have documents managed in a file share, then Acuvate Optimum can help you migrate to a sophisticated CMS systems such as Office 365 along with Lexico capabilities. You could analyze, set up your taxonomy, tag documents, and migrate them to your new CMS – all in one go.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
