Intranet Portals – Search And Taxonomies

Knowledge Management for beginners

Knowledge Management (KM) can be defined simply as the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Knowledge assets are often grouped into two categories:

(1) Explicit Knowledge: Generally, everything and anything that can be documented, archived and codified. Examples include patents, trademarks, business plans, marketing research and customer lists.

(2) Tacit Knowledge: The rest. Tacit knowledge is the know-how contained in people's heads. The challenge inherent with tacit knowledge is figuring out how to recognize, generate, share and manage it.

Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to reach – or go beyond - best practice. For explicit knowledge, the focus can usefully be described as “connecting people to things”, whilst for tacit knowledge, the focus is “connecting people to people”.

Search technologies made simple

There are essentially two types of search technology: structured search and unstructured search:

1) Structured Search: In a structured search (example Yahoo) the user clicks down through a directory of categories to find the material sought. The tree structure of the directory is called a taxonomy, with a root node at the top that applies to all objects and nodes below that classify more specific subsets of the total set of objects. A well-known example of a taxonomy is Carolus Linnaeus's Scientific classification of organisms. The root node is (implicitly) “organism” and nodes below are Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.

In Yahoo, the root is “Directory” and there are 14 main nodes, including Society & Culture, Social Science and Reference. If I were searching for best man’s speech tips (which I was not so long ago), I could try (on Yahoo) clicking down the branch of the tree: Directory > Society and Culture > Weddings > Speeches and Toasts. Alternatively, I could try Directory > Social Science > Communications > Public Speaking.

There are obvious pros and cons to structured search. The main con is that I might head down several blind alleys on the tree before finding the most useful branch. The main pro is that – once I have found that branch – I am likely to find a whole collection of relevant material gathered together in one place. For the librarian (maintaining the taxonomy), there is another key con. As our wedding example illustrates so well, there are often two or more places one could put any given information. Oh the agonies of choice!

2) Unstructured Search: In an unstructured search (example Google) the user enters a series of keywords into a search engine, which searches an index of content (regularly crawled) and brings back results, ordered by closest match to the search string.

The main pro of an unstructured search are that I do not have to second-guess where the right branch is on the taxonomy tree, but rather leap in at the leaf I am looking for. The cons are rather less obvious and the main one is that some materials I might actually find very useful may not come up in the search. This can be due to my poor selection of search terms, deficiency in indexing / search algorithms or poor metadata in the content itself.

Should I implement search functionality and, if so, how? Search invariably scores well on any prioritisation of intranet functionality and is generally “out-of-the-box” with your portal solution, so I would definitely recommend you include it in the scope of your project.It may not surprise you to hear that the most effective search implementations allow the - continued below ...