La taxonomie est morte! Vive la taxonomie…

Submitted by: Theresa Regli, Analyst at CMS Watch

12-Mar-2008Conference events and tracks are getting nichey-er and more specific, and rightly so, as every year the knowledge we accumulate about content technology gets deeper and more nuanced, which begs more specific presentations and probing questions from implementers. Earlier this week in London, I attended an event on The Essentials of Meta Data and Taxonomy, and despite my having talked about this topic for 10 years now, I admit I was pleasantly surprised that there were over 100 registrants for such a specific event. The conference featured perspectives from implementers, vendors, and yours truly, the token analyst.

The theme set for the day was The Semantic Revolution, which many are already referring to as Web 3.0, when meaningful and relevant information will more readily be exchanged among systems and targeted to people in a very precise and way (without even specifying what you’re seeking). Most claim that taxonomies and meta data are necessary to make it happen. As we note repeatedly in our Enterprise Search Report, search technology needs good categorization and metadata to perform well, and finding information is only one small piece of the Semantic Revolution. But, as this event demonstrated, people are still struggling with getting taxonomies and metadata in place: the tagging process and coming to agreements on controlled vocabularies is anything but easy. It requires serious business process modification and change management.

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