The primary functional need in today’s electronic information environments is providing effective and easy-to-use methods that enable users to find, navigate, and use content.
Iknow builds custom taxonomies and metadata schemas that help organizations store, search, find, and use their information more efficiently. During taxonomy development, we use a combination of both automated and human taxonomy development approaches. We start by analyzing our client’s information-filing models, searching behaviors, and search preferences. We incorporate several text mining/text analysis tools to extract terms from a comprehensive corpus of documents. We combine this information with expert taxonomies from other sources and our own knowledge about how best to build taxonomies to create a taxonomy that best fits their needs.
We develop administrative and descriptive metadata that augment the taxonomic terms. We create a metadata model based on multiple industry standards and combine it with the information that we have gathered from our client’s organization. We test and refine the taxonomy terms and metadata schemas using precision and recall testing in search platforms.
Iknow delivers custom taxonomies and metadata schemas/models that are handcrafted to our clients’ unique environments.
Much of our work in taxonomy and metadata development takes place in the context of larger knowledge management engagements. On these assignments, Iknow delivers not only a customized taxonomy but a completed enterprise content management (ECM) or digital asset management (DAM) system that incorporates the taxonomy and metadata for asset tagging.
Taxonomies and metadata, when properly implemented within a client’s ECM, DAM, or enterprise search system, improve the ability to find relevant content quickly. Specifically, taxonomies and metadata support filters, facets, browse, and other types of advanced search functionality.