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Services
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Clients and Case Studies
Taxonomy Strategies provides specialized consulting services to help organizations arrange their information for its most effective use. This section includes brief descriptions of recent projects and short, representative case studies. |
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Clients
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Clients |
Projects |
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Albertsons.com |
Revised existing product taxonomy, identified optimum set of attributes to support flexible product merchandising and worked to expose the new taxonomy on the public website to improve search, navigation and increase sales. Please see http://www.albertsons.com. |
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Allstate Insurance |
Prepared and facilitated taxonomy development process workshop. |
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Baker Hughes |
Worked with five divisions to develop consensus around three common vocabularies to demonstrate the feasibility and value of an enterprise taxonomy. Recommendations were provided on how to integrate the taxonomy with the content management system, portal and search engine environments.
Baker Hughes Direct: www.bakerhughesdirect.com. |
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BHP Billiton |
Provided general advice on what taxonomies might be needed, how these taxonomies should be developed, tools that are needed to develop these taxonomies, and methods for using them given the current corporate information management environment. |
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Blue Shield of California |
Developed multi-phased enterprise taxonomy roadmap which laid out content projects over time, and content classification facets to be developed to support those projects. |
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breastcancer.org |
Helped define the site’s functionality for personalization, and the metadata and taxonomy specification for the website page types.
breastcancer.org - Your lifeline to the best medical informatrion about breast cancer: www.breastcancer.org. |
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Campbell Soup Company |
Identified and prioritized facets for an enterprise taxonomy that would be most widely useful across the organization as a taxonomy roadmap. Provided advice on governance processes required for effective change management, maintenance, and extension of the taxonomy. |
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Capital One |
Defined and validated use cases with business users, then developed and tested metadata models and taxonomy outlines to support enterprise document management initiatives. |
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CAPS Research |
Provided advice on metadata, taxonomy, search, and navigation smoothly integrated with the rest of the effort for implementing the knowledgebase.
CAPS Research - A Global Research Center for Strategic Supply Management: www.capsresearch.org. |
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CEN - European Committee for Standardization |
Developed best practice guidelines on metadata and knowledge management through interviews and workshops with European and American companies. |
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Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services |
Worked with QualityNet stakeholders to build an enterprise taxonomy based on extended Dublin Core and existing vocabularies. Prepared training examples and taxonomy editorial rules, usage guidelines and change management recommendations. |
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Chelan County Public Utility District (PUD) |
Prepared enterprise-wide metadata and taxonomy recommendations for use in website re-design, intranet, and various document repositories.
Chelan County P.U.D.: www.chelanpud.org. |
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City of St. Louis |
Completed a metadata mapping, and controlled vocabularies to support the metadata elements. Worked to ensure that the content management system implementation is metadata-driven to support the generation of common functions such as A-Z indexes and portals based on content filters like location. Provided a brief specification that describes how search functions should would work with metadata. |
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Commodity Futures Trading Commission |
Conducted audience and content analysis of internal and public content used by staff and recommended key attributes to be used for organizing agency information. |
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Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) |
Prepared recommended approach and functional specifications for automatic categorization system to organize current intelligence reports. |
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Dell |
Identified standardized product attributes and developed a strategy for grouping them so they could be used in assisted navigation on the website so users could quickly find the products they want to buy.
Dell Buy Online: www.dell.com. |
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Environmental Protection Agency |
Developed the agency-wide taxonomy for tagging public websites and intranet content for use with a Documentum enterprise content management application, trained content editors and librarians to tag content using the taxonomy, and created the governance model for maintaining the taxonomy. The taxonomy is being used in a variety of EPA applications such as a new search engine based on a customized version of Northern Light that uses the taxonomy to filter search results.
EPA Northern Light prototype: nlquery.epa.gov/epasearch/searchutils/folders.html. |
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Federal Aviation Administration |
Developed an agency-wide metadata standard and faceted taxonomy for the FAA based on Dublin Core. |
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Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta |
Assessed the current state of the intranet by analyzing and evaluating the existing information architecture, metadata, and search, and recommended improvements based on the assessment and industry best practices. |
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Food and Drug Administration |
Worked with an agency-wide taxonomy working group through a series of workshops to develop a faceted taxonomy for tagging public and intranet content. The taxonomy was validated by sorting popular query terms and evaluating tagging consistency by FDA staff. Change management and training materials were also prepared. |
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Forest Service |
Conducted an agency-wide content audit using information retrieval spiders to systematically extract information and populate a metadata database. |
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General Services Administration |
Developed content architecture for FirstGov (the official portal of the U.S. government) including an XML content model, and metadata and vocabulary specifications to facilitate a reference implementation of a content management system application.
USA.gov – Government made easy: www.firstgov.gov. |
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Halliburton |
Consolidated multiple taxonomies developed for separate product lines, and developed rules and procedures for applying the taxonomy to content and delivering it through a portal application. |
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Harvard Business School Publishing |
Completied and optimized the publications catalog taxonomy, and provided guidance for re-tagging legacy content, integration with the product information management (PIM) system, website navigation and catalog search.
Harvard Business Online: www.hbsp.harvard.edu. |
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Hewlett Packard |
Developed taxonomy roadmap with recommended subject metadata facets, recommended controlled vocabularies, and taxonomy governance procedures for the business to employee portal. |
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Home Depot |
Designed and user tested a new top-level product taxonomy, revised the existing product taxonomy to reflect the new top-level categories, identified the optimum set of attributes to support flexible product merchandising, worked with others to expose the new taxonomy on the public web site in order to improve search, navigation and increase sales, developed editorial rules for category names and designed the business process for changing the product taxonomy.
Home Depot online store: www.homedepot.com. |
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IDEAlliance |
Facilitated the working group that developed the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) specification, an extensible XML metadata standard used to automate workflow processes which facilitate multi-purposing, aggregating, syndicating, personalizing and post-processing of any type of content.
IDEAlliance PRISM Working Group: www.prismstandard.org. |
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International Monetary Fund (IMF) |
Worked with business and IT stakeholders using a workshop process to develop recommendations on how the IMF should manage Country-related Terminology, and to provide guidance on how to simplify the use of standard terminology in published documents and IT applications. |
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K12 |
Developed the metadata specification and taxonomies for an e-learning content management system application profile. Prepared the content tagging plan, tagging guidelines, process guide for changing metadata and vocabularies, and training materials. Provided advice on building additional subject taxonomies for individual disciplines. |
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Microsoft.com |
Developed the taxonomy for Microsoft’s Next Generation Network, a new information architecture for serving up content dynamically on the third most visited website in the world.
Designed and analyzed the results of a test of alternative website navigation schemes using task-based scenarios with microsoft.com website users.
Microsoft.com: www.microsoft.com |
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Motorola |
Prepared metadata and taxonomy recommendations to develop and support a content supply chain. |
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My Wire |
Reviewed content classification system and made recommendations on how to improve and maintain it.
mywire: www.mywire.com |
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NASA |
Completed a classification scheme that encompasses all of NASA web content and provided three specializations for internal and external portal projects. The taxonomy was then refined and standard formats were developed to support its use. The NASA Taxonomy website was built to provide access to the taxonomy. A number of websites have been built using the NASA Taxonomy including one which provides access to multiple document repositories including technical reports, lessons learned, and mission documentation using the Seamark engine. A governance structure was developed and framework developed to make the Taxonomy a NASA standard.
NASA website: www.nasa.gov.
NASA Taxonomy website: nasataxonomy.jpl.nasa.gov.
NASA Taxonomy demo: demo.siderean.com/NASADemoV4/NASA-demoquery1.jsp.
Reviewed Goddard Space Flight Center taxonomies, and their potential for integration into the NASA Taxonomy. |
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National Association of Realtors |
Identified and prioritized facets for a web taxonomy based on previous taxonomy and user experience work, prepared a high-level taxonomy and vetted it with an internal taxonomy working group, designed a test of the taxonomy approach using task-based scenarios with REALTOR.org website users, and developed the process to maintain the taxonomy with a light weight governance model. Please see http://www.realtors.org. |
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OCLC |
Developed outreach template to lobby software vendors to implement support for Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Please see http://www.dublincore.org.
Developed recommendations for a new business model for the Dewey Decimal Classification. Please see http://www.oclc.org/dewey/. |
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Oracle |
Taxonomy Strategies built a taxonomy that accurately reflected Oracle's product and service offerings, that could be used to automatically identify application and technology bundles and applicable industries, and that could be effectively used for website search and browse applications.
Oracle Events: events.oracle.com.
Oracle Pressroom: pressroom.oracle.com/prNavigator.jsp. |
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PeopleSoft |
Developed core metadata specification and faceted taxonomy based on Dublin Core. |
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Small Business Administration |
Developed taxonomy specifications for populating the metadata for the GSA Business Gateway e-Forms initiative. |
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Singapore Infocomm Development Authority |
Developed, documented, and assisted in the implementation of the Singapore Government Metadata Standard (SGMS) for all Government-owned content. The SGMS standard is the underlying structure that enables the Singapore Government online search website.
Singapore Government online search portal: mysearch.internet.gov.sg. |
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Social Security Administration |
Prepared taxonomy recommendations for tagging web content with Dublin Core metadata, and developed new vision for flexible site organization, site navigation & site search that uses explicit metadata. |
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Sprint |
Identified existing controlled vocabularies, prepared high-level taxonomy, tested taxonomy by tagging content samples, and prepared taxonomy roadmap and governance documentation. |
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Time, Inc. |
Developed specific content aggregation XML dtd. |
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U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Economic Research Service |
Developed scalable metadata framework to enable content reuse, and handle changes in business goals, customer needs, and retrieval concerns.
USDA Economic Research Service - The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources and Rural America: www.ers.usda.gov. |
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U.S. Dept. of Agriculture e-Government Program |
Validated core metadata specification and faceted taxonomy based on Dublin Core, National Agricultural Library Thesaurus (NALT), and other pertinent vocabulary standards to be used as the standard for agency-wide information management. |
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U.S. Dept. of Education |
Validated conformance of ERIC metadata schema to the Qualified Dublin Core metadata model.
ERIC - Education Resources Information Center. The world's largest digital library of educational literature: www.eric.ed.gov. |
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U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security Citizenship and Immigration Services |
Collected and analyzed user requirements for the metadata and indexing for an Enterprise Document Management Service (EDMS) capability to store, manage, search, and view images for agencies requiring information. |
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Client Case Studies
Taxonomy Strategies provides specialized consulting services to help organizations arrange their information for its most effective use. This section includes case studies that represent some of our recent projects.
Halliburton
Halliburton, one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the petroleum and energy industries, needed assistance ensuring that technical information could easily be found and delivered to technicians in the field, to contractors, and to important large customers. The energy services industry had gotten so technical that it was taking years to get new technicians trained to do their job, and it had become difficult for contractors and customers to know what Halliburton product line their various products and services might be in. As new internal specialist portals, extranets, and www sites were being developed, Halliburton wanted to ensure that the problems with search would be fixed, and that the promise of personalized portals for technicians and customers would be realized.
Taxonomy Strategies worked with Halliburton's knowledge management staff to consolidate multiple taxonomies that had been developed for separate product lines, and to integrate them into a content architecture to be implemented as part of a new content management system. An important result of the project was the recognition that the logistics (materials and equipment) and the marketing (energy and petroleum lifecycle) views needed to be reconciled and mapped to each other in order to solve the problem. Eleven taxonomy branches or facets were implemented as a result of the project: Product Groups; Tools; Oil, Gas and Chemicals; Organization; Challenges; Other Materials; Content Types; Locations; Health, Safety and Environment; Energy and Petroleum Lifecycle; and Business Processes.
Currently, user communities are being trained to tag content using the new taxonomy and the new content management system. Legacy and new content will be tagged with values from the taxonomy before it is published to specialist portals, extranets, and www sites. The taxonomy data for each piece of content will then be available to build the search indexes and the personalization entitlements for each portal. New interfaces and search tools that can take advantage of the taxonomy beginning to be used by Halliburton are beginning to be prototyped and tested.
For more information, please see:
Jerry Ash. "Halliburton: A sustained commitment to collaboration." InsideKnowledge (March 14, 2005) http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/txtSearch.Social+network+analysis/exactphrase.1/sid.0/articleid.A3F161B5-ACFD-4DC2-A738-9CEBA621C15C/qx/display.htm.
D.L. Smith, J. Busch, R. Daniel, Jr. "Taxonomy: A Knowledge Sharing Enabler." Presented at: SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition held in Houston, Texas, U.S.A., 26-29 September 2004.
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Motorola Semiconductor
Motorola is a global leader in providing integrated communications and embedded electronic solutions. The Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS) is focused on developing proprietary, high value as opposed to commodity semiconductor products, and licensing intellectual property to strategic partners. To support design engineers, Motorola SPS developed a large extranet fed from various enterprise and documentation platforms using home-grown content management tools. Motorola SPS decided to migrate from its home-grown to a COTS content management system. The goal was to preserve the website user experience, while creating a new content model that could be applied to structured data from enterprise systems of record as well as less structured document-like content from product marketing.
Taxonomy Strategies worked with Motorola to take initial steps in the development of a new content architecture that untangles the metadata and taxonomies from the existing website user experience. We mapped attributes from existing content repositories into a common metadata specification, identified core metadata attributes for each content type included in the website, provided editorial rules for cleaning up existing collateral and product taxonomies, and prepared revised versions of the existing taxonomies by applying the editorial rules. In addition, we prepared a whitepaper with short and longer-term metadata and taxonomy recommendations to develop and support a content supply chain to support applications such as personalization and globalization with dynamically generated, targeted content.
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NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is composed of 12 separate Centers that engage in a variety of technological activities with product lines that reflect their specialized work. Technical communities across the Agency utilize highly evolved engineering and scientific vocabularies that reflect the nature of their disciplines. These vocabularies are often arcane and not easily translated by personnel outside a particular community of practice. This situation has tended to fragment information produced by NASA personnel. The goal behind building and adopting an agency-wide NASA Taxonomy is to develop a consistent framework for handling NASA's electronic content, and to make it easy for various audiences to find all the relevant information from all the NASA programs quickly.
Taxonomy Strategies worked with a group of NASA subject matter experts representing various constituencies including outreach, engineering, financial management, procurement, and scientific and technical information (STI). We used semi-structured interviews and analyzed collections of content to draft the top few levels of a NASA Taxonomy based on the content management methods and terminologies that we observed were currently in use. The top-level taxonomy was reviewed in an iterative process with stakeholders who responded to it in group meetings, via email, and in one-on-one conversations. The creation and validation of sub-trees and leaf nodes has been delegated to the subject matter specialists. Eleven taxonomy branches or facets were identified as a result of this project--Access Security Requirements, Audiences, Business Purpose, Competencies, Content Types, Industries, Instruments, Locations, Missions and Projects, Organizations, and Subject Categories--with content types identified as a key data driver. It turns out that content types or genres are a very important way that users segment their collections, or chunk larger content objects into smaller ones to support business functions and applications. Much work was done to adopt categories for standard genre and document types in the Information facet of the taxonomy so that users could start with a common understanding of what document frameworks they might be looking for and working with. The taxonomy also provides an exhaustive list of NASA missions and projects, as well as a three-level enterprise-wide organizational hierarchy which previously did not exist.
The NASA Taxonomy website was built to provide access to the taxonomy. The website is integrated with the FirstGov and Google to provide instant web search results. A metadata search and navigation application on a collection with a quarter of a million internal project and public documents from across the enterprise was built to demonstrate the benefits of using the NASA taxonomy. The completed taxonomy and its mapping to the Dublin Core metadata standard is meant to act as a classification scheme encompassing all of NASA Web content, including internal as well as external materials. The taxonomy will provide the framework for tagging NASA Web material so that they can be used and reused in different applications such as the NASA portal and its supporting systems, the NASA search engine, and the NASA Web Site Registration System.
For additional information please see: J. Dutra and J. Busch "Enabling Knowledge Discovery: Taxonomy Development for NASA: NASA Technical Whitepaper" at http://web-services.gov/NASA%20Taxonomy%20White%20Paper_final_rev.doc.
Please visit the NASA Taxonomy 2.0 website at http://nasataxonomy.jpl.nasa.gov.
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Oracle
Oracle set out to create a new experience for their community of developers to locate press releases and upcoming events based upon the member's interests and how they chose to search. Part of this experience would include surfacing content that a user would not find through traditional search methods.
Taxonomy Strategies worked with product marketing managers and discussed various aspects of product lifecycle, marketing and their audiences. The end product was the development of facets that would provide the framework for the new search experience. Beyond products, facets were created to capture audiences, technologies, product families, industries, services and applications. While it is common to think of vocabularies and their hierarchical structures and relationships, the highlight of the facets developed for Oracle is their ability to use non-hierarchical references to make connections across facets (e.g., Oracle 10G is a Database Technology). As a result, users can discover content that they may not otherwise know exists.
Using Siderean software, the facets became filters for a large content collection and users are now able to expand and narrow searches to find the content they are looking for and reveal buckets of similar content.
Please visit the following Oracle websites:
Oracle Events: events.oracle.com.
Oracle Pressroom: pressroom.oracle.com/prNavigator.jsp.
Oracle Technology Network: OTN Semantic Web (Beta): otnsemanticweb.oracle.com.
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[Last updated 2008-03-24]
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