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A Place for Everything: Content Vendor
Taxonomies Hook Clients to Useful Structure |
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13 June 2005 |
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The recent debut of LexisNexis Taxonomy puts the business
content giant toe to toe with Factiva in the arena for
extending the organization of vendor content into
enterprise portals. It's a great play and will certainly
provide LexisNexis with some important traction in the
portal wars, but it's not going to stop clients in their
tracks. Taxonomies used to organize content from a client's
files alongside vendor content can easily organize other
content - including content from competitors' services.
It's nice to get close to your clients hooked to you via
taxonomies, but don't count on them keeping your database
pricing warm and snug forever. |
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The movement
to integrate content in various forms from various sources into
unified intranet portals is gaining a lot of steam this year.
Fueled by increasingly prevalent and affordable content
management systems, enterprise search engines that are going
far beyond basic searching and a recognition that investments
in these tools have enormous paybacks for organizations trying
to keep abreast of a sea of structured and unstructured
electronic content. Corporate librarians play a role in this
mix oftentimes, but sometimes the tools that they most
appreciate are in short supply when it comes to organizing
content outside of traditional library-oriented information
services. One of these tools is taxonomies, pre-defined
hierarchies of content categorization that follow a conceptual
framework for organizing a body of thought. Different
disciplines have different conceptial frameworks, or ontologies,
to organize content into a taxonomy: Medical science has the
National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®)
taxonomy based on a medical view of the world, governments have
their view of the world, as do manufacturers and so on.
Enterprise content technology providers
have been filling the taxonomy gaps on intranet portals and
services with software that can categorize content using
existing taxonomies, custom taxonomies or taxonomies designed
by the automated analysis and categorization of content. These
systems have been increasingly effective and prevalent on
enterprise intranet portals to guide users in finding internal
content, but there's always the question of which taxonomy is
going to be right for a purpose. The technology can work great
and be highly usable but if the framework for a taxonomy isn't
right for browsing content people just won't bite. Items that
don't seem to fit in a given category or that find
themselves in categories that are too broad for a given purpose
will send people back to "single box" search engine interfaces
or their own home-grown systems for organizing content. Put
simply, getting the right taxonomy is key for a successful
portal.
The folks at LexisNexis hope to help
simplify that search for a good taxonomy by
introducing its new
LexisNexis Taxonomy service, a multi-faceted content
categorization system following in the footsteps of
Factiva Taxonomy Services. Like Factiva's offering
LexisNexis Taxonomy offers subject categorization, industry
categorization, company categorization and geographic
categorization, as well as a taxonomy of prominent people. Also
like Factiva LexisNexis offers a wide variety of interfaces,
toolkits, Web services capabilities and such to help clients
integrate its content into a client's Web environment. In other
words, if you like what LexisNexis does for scooping up your
content into TotalSearch or other implementations via its
SmartIndexing Technology you'll love what their taxonomy
can do with your own content categorization systems. This is of
course another way of saying that most companies considering
their own content categorization capabilities would prefer to
consume a taxonomy such as one from LexisNexis on an a la carte
basis: hold the technology, please, we have enough already.
Taxonomies such as those from Factiva and
LexisNexis can be a great boost to an in-house system that
relies on the strengths of the kind of content that these
aggregators provide. With the current boomlet in systems
providing business intelligence, competitive intelligence,
company analysis and reputation management the ontology that
powers these taxonomies can be a quite powerful framework for
organizing both internal and external content assets into a
common view of a company's competitive landscape. The
granularity of information that's in these aggregators'
databases is not so unlike a company's own organization of
competitive information, so it's an example of where an
externally developed and maintained taxonomy can provide a
quick path to integrating internal and external content for a
focused purpose in marketing and sales departments.
Great stuff, but is it the stuff of major
revenues? That's highly debatable. Content aggregators are
hoping to develop as many "hooks" into their clients' internal
content as possible, trying to create indispensable reliance on
their insights into content usage and organization that will
keep their relationships with their clients snug and happy.
Taxonomies are a great play in that they cost virtually nothing
for the aggregator - they're doing the work to develop them
anyway for their own content - and clients love the ability to
have everything in a familiar framework. It's also a way to get
users to subscribe to unique content - the taxonomy itself -
that compensates for the lack of uniqueness in much of an
aggregator's licensed content. Why Factiva versus LexisNexis?
Well, we're already using "X"es taxonomy so to change would be
a real pain, wouldn't it? A simple loyalty factor to manage,
one that these vendors hope will be an important hook into
content that can otherwise be found on the open Web in many
instances.
And that's rather the point. Taxonomies
are a great form of content that can become embedded quickly in
a client's infrastructure but it's easy to embed all sorts of
content into a taxonomy's categories - including content from
alternative sources that fills a similar purpose. Like the Web
itself, say. Aggregators like LexisNexis and Factiva do
themselves a great favor by extending the use of their
taxonomies into their clients' intranet environments, making it
easy to use their content alongside other sources of business
information, but it's a relatively weak leverage point to work
if other sources can provide effective substitute value that
undermines your content collection pricing. But of course it's
the pricing of the content collections that's fueling this kind
of development and marketing in the first place, in a
never-ending cycle to give clients reasons to pay rather hefty
subscription fees for premium content that would otherwise be
best acquired on an as-needed basis from other sources.
Extending your taxonomies to your clients is a great way to
open up your relationship to a new level of integration and
intimacy, but it won't make your other content and services
indispensable. Portals may find a place for everything via a
taxonomy - but don't count on it being a place for content
whose pricing and packaging no longer meets clients' needs.
-
John Blossom
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