Business Uses of Tags: Raytheon’s Approach
April 3rd, 2006
On the Taxonomy Community of Practice list, Christine Connors talked about what she’s doing with tagging (aka folksonomies):
We use a hybrid approach at Raytheon, and it works great. We have folks submit URLs with the keywords they would tag the resource with. A team of librarians then takes a look at the submission, corrects for spelling mistakes, adds additional terms, and approves the item for production (search and sent to the webmaster of that site for addition to the meta data.) We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission.
In search, we insert Suggested Sites in a “feature” box to the right of the regularly ranked results. We do not allow these suggestions to affect the ranking determined by the algorithm. Our surveys show that the sites submitted via this process repeatedly rank as the result deemed “best” for the user’s query. It is the single best thing we’ve done. I can’t tell you how much we’ve spent on formal taxonomies, but suffice it to say that it’s enough for me to wonder why I haven’t gone into business for myself!
Why does it work? Chiefly because the sites submitted are specific to a group or discipline, and no matter how hard we try, having a degree in library science does not give you a degree in engineering (insert discipline here). We do not speak their vernacular. We do well enough to add value with controlled terms, but these folk tags have a life of their own.
These tags are a fantastic resource – user warrant – for keeping the controlled vocabularies up-to-date. They provide us feedback we could get no other way. Given the ease with which people can tag things – and yes, we could argue about whether there should be some cognitive burden for quality’s sake – we gain a unique
insight via this process.
Are you using tagging in your business? If so, how?
April 4th, 2006 at 5:54 am
At the BBC, we use a similar hybrid approach, whereby content producers suggest new metadata terms and a team of information architects moderate them for our controlled vocabularies. I suspect the BBCs approarch differs from Raytheon’s in that our indexing system is rules based. This means that the system can automatically suggest metadata to the user. When a content producer creates an article in the CMS the text is parsed, and based on the rules set by the IAs, metadata terms from our cvs are suggested for that article. The content producer can then select metadata from the systems suggestions, if the term they want to use is not suggested they can search our cvs, if they still do not find their term they can send a request to the IAs for the term to be added to the CV.
This system works very well by striking a balance between the organic richness you get from user input and the consistency and structure achieved from a more traditional librarian approach to indexing.
April 4th, 2006 at 7:02 am
[...] Är detta då inte bara vad bibliotekarier och andra informationsspecialister alltid gjort – och gör bättre? Nej, det är ytterligare en dimension. På företaget Raytheon använder de en hybrid som involverar informationsspecialister. We have folks submit URLs with the keywords they would tag the resource with. A team of librarians then takes a look at the submission, corrects for spelling mistakes, adds additional terms, and approves the item for production (search and sent to the webmaster of that site for addition to the meta data.) We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission. [...]
April 7th, 2006 at 11:59 am
How much time does this take? It sounds like it would be too labor intensive for a lot of sites.