[Sigia-l] Categorization question...

[seth]

There are (at least) three issues here: 

1. Whether the infrastructure can expose faceted navigation.  (If not, you
can consider bolting on a search interface that leverages entity extraction
or metadata) 

2. Stability of top level terms and how flexible the 'core' organizing
principles are.

3.  Retrospectively indexing content that existed before a facet was
conceived, mapping new terms to content or updating terms already applied to
content.  

In a meeting today to review a faceted taxonomy for an insurance company, we
were asked about the implications of change. 

The answer is that there will always be new and evolving terms, but the high
level characterization of those terms (the top term, facet or metadata
field) should stay somewhat stable.  What do sales people, customer service
reps and claims processors need to understand?  Well, certainly Product for
one.  Coverage issues for another, etc.  There are certain organizing
principles that naturally characterize information and that should stay
somewhat stable. 


If there are completely new processes or business characteristics that
emerge over time, can those be described in the current framework (adding a
new hierarchy to an existing facet and selectively exposing that to the
user), or do we need to create new metadata facets and populate those? 

The challenge is always about exposing the metadata to the UI both for
tagging and navigation and of course going back and adding the metadata that
was not captured before the requirement was identified.


Seth
	
Seth Earley 
Earley & Associates, Inc 
781-444-0287 
781-820-8080 cell
 
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Blog:  "Not Otherwise Categorized" 
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-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Gary Carlson
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 7:12 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Categorization question...


Perhaps one of the other lessons learned here is to understand the
limitations of whatever model is being created up front.  Even with the
best analysis up front there can always be some business requirement
which comes down requiring a look see at the information using facet N+1
(or it may be that the creation or management of facet N+1 is too
expensive or difficult).  
Identifying this up front has helped me search for more flexible models
when working with clients and has helped the clients understand their
data and internal processes better.

Gary Carlson