[Sigia-l] Dublin core subject and dewey decimal

[Fortune Elkins]

 my situation is familiar to you all: we are a small company that has
grown huge quite rapidly (about 5 months), I mean from 300 people to
3500, with global offices. we must integrate several disorganized
intranets into one portal. Our legacy web pages have poor to zero
metadata. 

We need to add metadata to make the legacy pages searchable, and also
create a taxonomy for the future that users can select in the content
management system. And of course we must do this in a short time and at
relatively low cost.

I have looked into buying various taxonomies and implementing dublin
core (not just as fields in the database, but actually also outputting
the tags on our intranet pages), which does seem to be the best
practice. Our intranet will not only be a standard portal, but due to
the kind of organization we are, will truly become our online "corporate
library." since we have the luxury of basically starting from scratch,
we might as well do it the "right" way, but establishing best practice
isn't always easy in this regard.

Our industry is banking and capital markets technology -- wholesale,
retail, risk, treasury and capital markets, as well as islamic banking
-- thus we would only have to offer dewey decimal headings from the
realm of the 330s, 600s for technology, 657 for accounting, and the
human resource section under 650.

This limited selection has some advantages, for example, it is an
international standard everyone has used at some point in their lives
already, being numbers it doesn't have to be translated into french or
chinese, etc.  I see from the book by arlene taylor "the organization of
information" that one of her examples uses dewey in the dublin core tags
(figure 7.4). 

Please advise. We realize before we begin portal development that an
enterprise taxonomy is actually a form of business analysis, and it has
to be done right *before* we start in order for the portal to be
successful.
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