relational navigation: a taxonomy-based approach to information access and discovery (taxonomy boot...

Relational Navigation: A Relational Navigation: A Taxonomy-Based Approach Taxonomy-Based Approach to Information Access and to Information Access and DiscoveryDiscovery

Relational Navigation: A Relational Navigation: A Taxonomy-Based Approach Taxonomy-Based Approach to Information Access and to Information Access and DiscoveryDiscovery

Bradley P. Allen, Founder & CTOSiderean Software, Inc.

Taxonomy Boot CampNovember 9th, 2007

Bradley P. Allen, Founder & CTOSiderean Software, Inc.

Taxonomy Boot CampNovember 9th, 2007

Copyright © 2001-2007 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

Helping People Master Discovery

• Founded 2001– First to deliver a turn-key

Semantic Web solution for Information Access and Discovery

• Venture funded 2004– Clearstone, Innocal, Red Rock

• Headquarters in LA, offices in NYC, Boston, Chicago and Menlo Park

• 25 employees

• 35 customers


Mastering Discovery For Business Success

• Discovering new opportunities, markets and solutions is key to winning in the market

• But people don’t know what’s available to them

• Search is insufficient to solve their problem

• They need to navigate, not search


Orienteering vs. Teleporting


Discovery Requires Navigation

• A shared, unified view of the scope of available information

• Zeroing in on relevant information quickly

• Finding and following relationships

• Sharing discoveries with others


Semantics Enables Discovery

• Relational navigation is built around ontologies, not text– Using RDF, the W3C standard

that is the underpinning of the Semantic Web

• Ontologies bring relationships to the fore– Text search throws

relationships away

• Result: people master discovery with a greater range of techniques than just with free-text search


Discovery Using Semantics: Relational Navigation

KeywordKeyword

KeywordKeyword

KeywordKeyword

Search Relational Navigation

ConceptConcept

Faceted Navigation

Querying “bags of words”

Slicing and dicing homogeneous objects

guided by trees of concepts

Navigating through a network of related

heterogeneous objects


The Role of Taxonomies in Relational Navigation

• Taxonomies provide the navigational “glue” that binds information objects of different types by subject facets– Taxonomies (thesauri, controlled vocabularies) are represented

using a standard ontology (SKOS)– Conceptual, geographical, temporal hierarchies can be viewed

as taxonomies

• Other facets come from asset, relational and usage metadata– Other ontologies (DC, FOAF, FRBR, etc.) come into play here

• Together the provide the basis for zeroing in on and pivoting across information resources


Zeroing In: The Faceted Navigation Base Case

subject

s2

genre

s1

sm

sn

g2g1 gm gn

documents


Adding Faceted Taxonomies

subject s3

genre

s2

sm

sn

g3g2 gm gn

documents

g0

g1

s0

s1


Adding Search

subject s3

genre

s2

sm

sn

g3g2 gn

documents

g0

g1

s0

s1

“bacon”


Finding And Following Relationships

subject s2

genre

s1

sm

sn

g2g1 gm gn

documents

g0

g1

s0

s1

persons

dc:creator


Finding And Following Relationships

subject

genre

documents

personsdc:creatorfrbr:creatorOf

title

location

corporate bodies

size

industry

foaf:memberfoaf:member -1


Relational Navigation As Bates’ Berrypicking

• “Berrypicking differs from the conventional model for searching in that the searcher picks up bits of information here and there, just as one plucks berries from various bushes in real-world berrypicking.” [Bates 2003]

Bates, M. J. (1989a). Design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface. Online Review, 13, 407-424.


Example: Clearstone Portal


Building Relational Navigation Applications

Extract entities, terms, attributes and relationships that unify the content and data using standard taxonomies and ontologies

Aggregate content, data from inside and outside the firewall

Generate social navigation experiences for resource discovery


Use Case: Oracle Marketing

Products, technologies, posts, authors, events

Content repositories of product marketing

information, blog feeds

Navigate over product information, blog and forum posts and event

information


Use Case: Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials

Medical terms, test events, reports, study authors, compounds,

protocols

Content repositories of pre-clinical and clinical trials, clinical test DB

Navigate over clinical documents and

records


Use Case: Financial Services IT Portfolio Management

People, services, products,

organizations, responsibilities

People directory DB, IT services DB, HW/SW

product DB

Navigate over products and services


Social Navigation Experiences Now Yield Folksonomies

• The convergence of data and content means “everything is metadata” (David Weinberger)

• Users are contributing– Content– Annotations– Tags

• The union set of tags across a collection forms a folksonomy


The Integration of Folksonomies and Taxonomies

• Folksonomies can make taxonomies more responsive– To individuals and groups

• Taxonomies can make folksonomies more responsible– To organizations and institutions

• The two can be represented using the same ontology (SKOS) and tags can themselves be tagged in editorial workflow


Navigation Using Folksonomies and Taxonomies

subject s3

tag

s2

sm

sn

t2t1 tm tn

documents

s0

s1


Tagging the Tags in Editorial Workflow


Use Case: Online Newspaper Publishing

Topics, people, organizations, sources

RSS/Atom feeds from multiple Web sources, proprietary premium

content

Navigate over aggregated news and

topic stream filtered by editorial tagging


Summary

• Mastering discovery is key to business success

• This is waking the enterprise market to navigation as the way to help people master discovery

• Relational navigation is a new approach to resource discovery that leverages existing investments in taxonomies and ontologies

Siderean Software, Inc.390 North Sepulveda Blvd.Suite 2070El Segundo, CA 90245-4475 USA

+1 310 647-4266

http://www.siderean.com

[email protected]

Siderean Software, Inc.390 North Sepulveda Blvd.Suite 2070El Segundo, CA 90245-4475 USA

+1 310 647-4266

http://www.siderean.com

[email protected]

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