Taxonomy, Tagging, and Semantics Health Check
Content Engineering
Taxonomy, Tagging, and Semantics Health Check
Living with a tags and terms mess? Start to bring order to the chaos by getting a clear view of the current state of an organization's various sources of semantic truth across taxonomies, tags, picklists, and other term sources to build a shared view on a healthier (and easier) future state for enterprise knowledge.
It's all-too-normal to have a messy set of terms that no one really shares. Many organizations tag and manage content with multiple taxonomies that live in multiple spreadsheets and systems. Sometimes tags are even "made up" on the fly in a totally random way. Yet many of these taxonomies and term sets are super valuable resources when aligned and used to build a publishing environment to support Intelligent Customer Experiences.
Take this health check from [A] to discover what exists today, and take the first steps to a more coherent and organized future. This health check investigates the current state of semantics and semantic systems. Learn how to tap into, connect, and strengthen these resources to improve the customer experience.
During the presentation of findings:
- Discover how to use shared semantics to create massive efficiencies for teams throughout the content lifecycle.
- Peek into the future, and learn how semantics power the ontologies and knowledge graphs that will underpin future customer experience.
- Get a handle on email management, records management, legal compliance, faceted search experiences, content targeting, content personalization, chatbots, and content asset discover
- Look into ways technology today can help us manage tag sets, auto-tag content (in a human-supervised ways)
Learn how to maintain related content sets using the organization's managed semantic standards.
Build the foundation for a cohesive and consistent pool of intelligent content assets.
Benefits
Knowledge and content-rich organizations should appreciate and prioritize around how much semantics matter to internal operations, publishing, and all customer experiences. This health check is a great way to get started. Some of the direct and secondary benefits of the [A] semantics health check include:
- Begin to chart the hidden sources of semantic knowledge already running around
- Know what's really broken, and where, with the current taxonomies, tagging, and semantics
- Validate the strengths of existing term sets and management systems
- Identify current and needed approaches to taxonomy and term mapping, thesauri, and indices
- Discover the deltas between the semantic model facets already defined and best-practice model dimensions
- Identify what sorts of tag sets the organization will need to build Intelligent Customer Experiences
- Start to optimize the value of content assets through consistent enrichment
- Capitalize on existing but often disparate content team's organizational systems
- Set content discovery on the right path, so that content owners no longer need to feel like content is being buried or forgotten
- Create the ability to semantically connect content for contextual relevance and improved customer experience
- Justify investments to more effectively and efficiently find, manage, and use content assets
Using this health check, take necessary steps to determine which semantic initiatives and investments will add the most value to customers and business objectives.
Product Details
Getting Started
Before the health check, as part of scoping, [A] sends stakeholders a preliminary questionnaire addressing currently known sources and technical systems, and the size and scale of semantics in use today.
Some organizations with many sources and groups need a larger team and deeper dive. Some have more straightforward systems and discovery can be isolated to a few content sets and stakeholders.
The core health check
[A] collaborates with an organization's semantically involved team(s) in a combination of interviews, workflow analysis, system audits, surveys, and a group discovery session in order to collect the material for analysis.
The analyst team works to create an understanding of how mature processes and artifacts are currently, and where the recognized and unknown gaps are today.
Phases of this health check include:
Taxonomy Data Gathering: Using structured interviews, surveys, and analysis of provided artifacts, [A] maps existing sources of semantics and their usages.
Value of Semantics to the Organization: Using the same discovery process, [A] works with stakeholders through an appreciative inquiry process to map the value of current resources to the value and opportunities of a potential future state.
Semantics Technology and Platforms Audit: [A] will conduct an audit of the platforms and systems being used to manage taxonomies.
Semantics Governance and Usages Audit: Get to the root of the process behind semantics today, and understand better how the tag systems are supposed to be used, what's really happening, and what could be happening with the tags that run marketing, support, and other core customer functions.
Presentation of Findings: A live remote, recorded, presentation of findings to stakeholders, with education and vision-building components. Also includes recommendations, defined next steps, process and governance approaches, along with valuable facilitated group discussions.
Optional:
On-Site Taxonomy Data Gathering: Working with existing organizational teams, [A] will identify and investigate existing taxonomies, informal lists of terms, implicit taxonomies like categories or tags in content platforms and systems, and examples of associated content.
On-Site Presentation of Findings: A presentations of the health checks findings and recommendations given to stakeholders. This facilitates discussion, deeper understanding, team alignment, and active solution oriented problem solving.
Deliverables
- Collected and cataloged existing taxonomies
- Defined semantic annotation standards
- Defined metadata tagging standards
- Written opportunities and recommendations for future taxonomy uses and associated governance
- Presentation of findings with facilitated group discussions.