Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging

In this post Doug Cornelius addresses two kind of metadata systems: Taxonomies and “Folksconomies”.

He finds taxonomies good to use but very rigid and sometimes to big for users two find there way in them. When you have to go through a couple of hundred terms to find the right category, you soon loose your interest for them and stop categorizing documents. To overcome this problem the software industry invented “Automatic categorization”. Products like Autonomy and West KM provide such functionality.

Folksconomies solve this problem with a user generated taxonomy called “tags” (yep there they are again). The strenght of this tagging is that anybody can do it and that it’s really easy to add tags to content. The tagging system is a real web 2.0+ thing: Let the users have something to say about the content they read and produce.

A good enterprise search environment uses both: A (automated) taxonomy and user generated tags. This will boost relevance and findability (is that a word?) of documents and information.

KM Space: Taxonomies and Folksonomies

Tonight was the first time I know of that GMail (Google’s ever lasting EMail Beta) was offline.

The problems started to occur around 21:00 (GMT +1)  and were still there at the time of this post.

When such a thing happens I wonder if my choice for GMail was a good one. I didn’t had any problems the last year but EMail is a thing that just has to be there, all the time and everywhere. Because of the “Beta” and “Free” status of the service they can get away with this.

Let see if this hits the news.

The dutch weblog GeenCommentaar (noComment) opens up democracy by making the dutch parliamentairy system searchable.

For years the system the that the dutch government uses, Parlando, is very unusable. Every visitor gets a unique session id that is used to create the links to documents during this session. As a result there are no “permalinks” thatyou can refer to when writing about a specific discussion.

GeenCommentaar has build a simple solution around this application. The GeenCommentaar/Parlando search system creates unique and reusable links.

The dutch Parliament is in the process of rebuilding the system but in the mean time this site fullfills  the needs of many!

Google has a service called Google Base. With that service you can create an online database of everything you want to catalog. Google then makes this database searchable on Google Base and also on Google.com

Freebase is a startup from Metaweb that does almost the same but in a different way. In a coming article I’m planning to evaluate the both. Robert Cook from Freebase has already put some explanation on his weblog.

Tim O’Reilly has posted an article on his blog about Freebase, saying that the concept is HUGE.

New Idea Engeneering, a company specialized in consultancy on enterprise search, has published their version of the “Gartner quadrant” of the players in de enterprise search martket.

A very good analysis with a bit of informaion on all the companies. The conclusion is that FAST and Autonomy are stil the best of the breed because they have vision and the needed execution power to bring that vision to life. The article also illustrates the different aproaches that FAST and Autonomy have when it comes to implementing. Autonomy is more like “we know what you need, don’t worry about it” and FAST like “if you know search, you’ll really appreciate us“.
New Idea Engeneering concludes that FAST has more API’s and better tuning possibilities.

Google and IBM are nibbling at the shares of the two forementioned companies though.

I have got nothing more to add… feast your eyes on this! One page with all the links to web 2.0 sites that mean something. The site itself is also in a web 2.0 fashion with interactive and intuitive functions.

Go2Web20.net - The complete Web 2.0 directory

According to Phil Bradley searchengines are to be outdated. The reason for that is that they are not evolving in the same pace that the web is. In the 2.0 era of the web we expect that we don’t have to search in the old fashioned way; we expect the answers to come to us when we need them (wow: an answer to a question I didn’t know of ;-)).

But seriously… He has a few goog points.

PS.  The site on which you can view the presentation is also a new Web 2.0 social sharing initiative like YouTube etc.

Online Conference 2006 ‘The Death of Search’ » SlideShare

Rollyo is a web 2.0 search tool provider. With Rollyo you can create a list of sites that you know contain good information about some topic. Rollyo then makes a kind of personalised search channel for that “SearchRoll”.
The best thing is that you can share the Searchroll with others. That is the web 2.0 part of it: people make the content of this site.

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

Microsoft has published a couple of presentations with there view on enterprise search in combination with the Office Suite and Sharepoint.

You can download the presentations on the Microsoft site.

As a search professional I’m very interested in the combination of desktop search and internet of intranet search. In my opinion the user should be able to use one simple searchbox on his or her desktop to search all the indexed content in the enterprise without having to go to some intranet page with the browser.

I know that Autonomy has the Active Windows Extension to combine the search for local content and content that is indexed in a IDOL server somewhere within the company.

Now it appears you can do the same with Windows Desktop Search (WDS) and an Sharepoint based intranet. Joel Oleson has written an article on how to tweak WDS to use an existing Sharepoint repository when performing a desktop search.