WAND: New Business Taxonomy Available
July 10, 2008
Taxonomies are slightly less popular among the enterprise search crowd than Hanna Montana and petrol prices. WAND, a developer of controlled vocabulary tools and services, has rolled out what the company calls “a robust enterprise taxonomy.”
The idea is that most organizations remain clueless about taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, knowledge bases, and ontologies. The words are easy to say, but the ability to create a schema that a human being in an organization can use is a very different kettle of fish.
WAND’s taxonomy will allow a clueless or semi-clueless organization to get a taxonomy, edit it, and use the terms and hierarchies as a way to tag processed content. According to the company’s news release:
WAND’s new business vocabulary provides a four-level hierarchy of important business terminology covering human resources, accounting and finance, sales and marketing, legal, and information technology. The vocabulary includes all the core business concepts that any company has to deal with and can be extended and customized to include company specific terminology. WAND’s enterprise taxonomy can easily be paired with an existing enterprise search engine to improve the relevancy of search results returned.
You can learn more about the company and license fees here. I wrote about Arikus, another vendor offering off-the-shelf taxonomies here. I profile two other taxonomy players in my Beyond Search study for the Gilbane Group, Access Innovations and SchemaLogic. You can also tap MuseGlobal for this type of information as well. Some companies assert that you can learn how to “do” a taxonomy quickly by signing up for a one-day class. Okay, maybe that will work. It’s taken most of the professionals working on real-deal controlled vocabularies decades to hone their skills. I thought I knew words, but after working with Betty Eddison, founder of InMagic, and later with the Access Innovations’ team, I learned that I knew essentially zero. Fortunately, working with these folks helped me to be more informed about knowledge systems.
Take a peek at the WAND controlled term list and share what you learn with the two or three readers of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2008
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