Content analysis: Using taxonomies to improve collaboration

Content analysis: Using taxonomies to improve collaboration Open Intelligence.

Ark Group presents our One-day MASTER CLASS

February 10, 2010 – Holborn Bars, London

Thanks to the Internet, the world has become a swelling ocean full of data. One grand challenge of our age is to find a way to harness that data. And that’s where the burgeoning field of analytics comes in. Companies as large as IBM and as small as Twitter are looking to hire people who can boil down this ocean of data into knowledge and insights that can help improve the performance of their businesses.Business Week, December 2009

First it was Tag Clouds and Folksonomies. Now it is a growing number of services, such Twitter Trends, Trendrr, and Trendsmap. Web 2.0 is embracing self signifying knowledge — making useful inferences from patterns in metadata [1]. The massive investment in analytics software by the likes of IBM indicates the size of the market, and the size of the problem. The need for better analysis has never been greater.

The Master Class will show how to use content analysis techniques to turn the tables on the knowledge glut. The increasing volume of information flows becomes an intelligence advantage, rather than an overwhelming challenge.

Using Content Analysis techniques, collaborators can co-create a new level of self signifying intelligence. They can reflect on their collective thinking in new ways, based on measurable evidence, rather than hearsay.

Content analysts have been making systematic inferences from communications flows using faceted taxonomies for at least 70 years in both academia and in intelligence communities.[2] Its tried and tested methods have now been vastly enhanced by Web 2.0, and Open Source software giving it the capability of becoming a widely used knowledge refining tool for collaborating social networks, just when the need for such a tool is becoming increasingly urgent.

These techniques do not rely on any black box or AI software solution. Nor do they require any specialised academic knowledge to implement. They do demand a degree of discipline and consistency, not to mention the real thing … shared human intelligence. The techniques, when learned, are simple and inexpensive — ideal for times when money is scarce. On the other hand, it will increase the value and productivity of work groups because they will be working with a much higher level of common knowledge.

More information @http://openintelligence.wordpress.com

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