2003_What Taxonomies Do for the Enterprise

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ResearchPublication Date: 10 September 2003 ID Number: AV-20-8780

2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without priorwritten permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable.Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have noliability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The readerassumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressedherein are subject to change without notice.

What Taxonomies Do for the Enterpr ise

Rita E. Knox, Debra Logan

In the past six months, Gartner has fielded a flurry of questions about taxonomies, a keycomponent of managing corporate intellectual assets. In this Spotlight, we cover many ofthe most important issues.


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Publication Date: 10 September 2003/ID Number: AV-20-8780 Page 2 of 4

2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

ANALYSIS

Content management, document management and knowledge management have been part ofour clients' vocabulary for many years, but in 2003, there has been a major rise in explicitconcerns about "metadata" and "taxonomies." Firms in every industry want to know how to use

taxonomies, share them, build them, where to get them, what their benefits are and what willhappen if they don't have them.

Many firms have launched taxonomy projects. Some are enterprisewide, identifying broadconcepts that reflect the company structure or other companywide organizing principles. Thesetaxonomies contain common, recognizable terms, regardless of a particular user's affiliation.Other taxonomies are specific to a particular department or business unit, whose uservocabularies and structures are unique to a company subset. All taxonomies have two objectives:

! Create reusable structures that store content components, regardless of the format orstorage location.

! Enable users to navigate these structures to access a particular subject of interest.

Whether they're governed by senior IT executives or a department head, taxonomy creationproject teams are realizing that their task isn't trivial. It seemsdeceptively simple; users createtaxonomies as part of their everyday work for example, labeling their e-mail folders and localfile folders, and sorting content accordingly. However, users' individually created taxonomieshave at least two serious shortcomings:

! Users quickly lose track of the labels and structures of their categories. They find itdifficult to remember how they organized the material. As a result, they can't recall whatcategories were named or where a particular piece of content might be located.

! Taxonomy structures aren't necessarily computer-processable, so the work can't beoffloaded to a machine to maintain the content going forward.

Ontologies data structures that capture the relationships between terms and categories and,thus, some of their meaning are key to taxonomy development and maintenance. Fewknowledge workers even know that ontologies exist, let alone understand how to use them whencreating taxonomies. Unfortunately, those who understand why ontologies are important typicallydon't have the tools or the time to maintain them.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifies that an ontology defines terms, their propertiesand concepts (including relationships), which are used to describe bodies of knowledge.Taxonomies are examples of ontologies because they provide the terms of a domain andrepresent a structured relationship (typically hierarchical) among those terms. An ontology maybe used to generate a taxonomy. Because many ontologies are publicly defined and maintained,they must be referenced to be exploited during taxonomy creation and maintenance.

Few "laypersons" have the intuition or the skills to develop robust, extensible and long-livedtaxonomies. Initially, only a specially trained staff (for example, library scientists) will be able tosuccessfully lead taxonomy efforts. Without personnel who have formal taxonomy skills,enterprises will be unable to develop robust, functional taxonomies. Through 2006, more than 70percent of firms that invest in unstructured information-management initiatives won't achieve theirtargeted return on investment, due to underinvestment in taxonomy building (0.7 probability).

Features


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"How to Build and Manage Your Taxonomy" Specific guidelines can help you to build andmanage taxonomy projects, estimate how much time to spend, learn from other companies'efforts and determine what benefits come from developing taxonomies. By Kathy Harris, FrenchCaldwell and Rita Knox

"Taxonomy Development: Build or Buy?" Taxonomy technology is broad and increasinglysophisticated, but you should understand its benefits and hazards. By Rita Knox, Kathy Harris,

French Caldwell and Debra Logan

"How to Create Taxonomies That Save Time and Money" Nine best practices can help toensure success in your taxonomy development efforts, save you time and money and learn fromthe successes and failures of other firms. By Debra Logan and Rita Knox

"Search and Taxonomy Converge for Information Retrieval" A variety of technologies help todeliver what users want, and search and taxonomy exploitation are converging to serve thispurpose. By Whit Andrews

"Taxonomy Creation: Bringing Order to Complexity" Learn about how detailed yourtaxonomies should be; what the relationship is between content management, knowledgemanagement and taxonomies; and what the similarities and differences are between metadataand taxonomies. By Kathy Harris, French Caldwell, Alexander Linden, Rita Knox and Debra

Logan

"A Process Model for Creating a Taxonomy" A "taxonomy project" can define and implement ataxonomy to manage a corpus of information, but the complexity and time requirements will varywidely with usage patterns, content and business context. By Kathy Harris, French Caldwelland Rita Knox

"Taxonomy for Business Best Practices Thrives" The American Productivity & Quality Center'sProcess Classification Framework, which is a refreshed taxonomy, can help you to define,implement and benchmark your business processes, model your firm's activities and benefit fromthe lessons of other users. By French Caldwell

"Arup Profits From Better Access to Project Knowledge" Arup, a structural engineering firm,developed a taxonomy-based system to manage project knowledge and locate expertise from its

worldwide organizations. By Debra Logan

Recommended Reading and Related Research

"Understanding and Using Taxonomies" Successfully maneuvering through taxonomiesrequires learning the basics, including their key features, how to build them and how they relate toportals and other applications. By Debra Logan

This research is part of a set of related research pieces. See "Taxonomies Generate Return onInvestment" for an overview.


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2003_What Taxonomies Do for the Enterprise