Hello.  I am a new member of the list and thought I would introduce myself
briefly.

I run an independent consultancy in the UK specializing in knowledge &
information architecture (KA & IA).  That means we spend a lot of time doing
things like analyzing business activity systems, knowledge and information
auditing and mapping, information content analysis & synthesis, ontology,
taxonomy and thesaurus building, metadata profile design and looking at ways
of integrating disparate knowledge and information resources within
organizations.  From such a broad remit, it's obvious that we work in all
four current 'buzzword areas' - Knowledge Management (KM), Content
Management (CM), Document Management (DM) and Records Management (RM) -
sometimes simultaneously, since it's becoming increasingly difficult, in our
view, to sustain the conventional artificial divisions among these four
disciplines.  In fact, we see them as forming a continuum, with RM as a
foundation discipline and the others building upon it: RM > DM > CM > KM.

EVALUATION OF TAXONOMY/THESAURUS MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS
After that rather 'in-your-face' introduction, I thought it might be
appropriate to rehabilitate myself by sharing a couple of things with the
list.  A couple of topics in recent months' posts caught my attention.  The
first was a discussion of applications available for building and managing
taxonomies and thesauri.  As it happens, we have just finished an EDRMS
project with a European institution in Luxembourg, where we undertook a
business activity analysis to produce a Business Classification Scheme (BCS)
as per ISO 15489 and DIRKS, as well as identifying a number of other
taxonomies and classification schemes relevant to their needs.  As part of
our remit, we needed to recommend a tool for maintaining not only the BCS
and other taxonomies but also various other aspects of the IA outside the
EDRMS application, including metadata profiles and an organization-wide
thesaurus.  Consequently, we undertook an evaluation exercise of the tools
on the market.

We used three sources to compile our initial list of candidates:

1) Our own knowledgebase of applications supporting Information and
Knowledge Management
2) Leonard Will's extremely useful notes on his WillPower site covering some
40-odd thesaurus software applications
3) A Web search on Google using the keywords 'taxonomy management',
'thesaurus management' and 'ontology management', with subsequent
refinements.

Without releasing confidential details, I thought it might be useful to
share two things in respect of this exercise.  Firstly, we started with the
following list of 20 candidates from many different parts of the globe:

a.k.a (Australia)
Clearforest (US)
Gammasite (Israel)
HierEd (UK)
Intelligent Topic Manager, ITM (France)
Intology Taxonomy Builder (Australia)
Inxight Categorizer (US)
Knowledge Engineering Workbench (US)
MindCategorizer (US, Germany)
mohoClassifier (US)
MultiTes (US)
Protégé (US)
Stratify Taxonomy Manager (US)
Taxonomy Builder 5.5 (US)
TCS-8 (US)
Teragram (France)
Termchoir (US)
TermTree (Australia)
UniClass (US)
WordMap (UK)

A number of these turned out to be purely automatic categorization
applications.  After evaluation, we had a shortlist of three, although I am
unfortunately not at liberty to say which three.

The second thing it might be useful for me to share, is that our evaluation
criteria were partly derived from the client's special requirements and
partly from a document produced by the UK Office of the e-Envoy (this is
detailed on Leonard's site as well):

"Design/selection criteria for software used to handle controlled
vocabularies":
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/2004-01%20GCL%20softwareRequirements.pdf

POOR MAN'S EDMS
Finally (I can hear the gasp of relief!), I note a post back in April
regarding a "poor man's EDMS" for those smaller organizations who can't
afford the likes of TRIM, LiveLink, Documentum or Hummingbird.  Well, we've
been looking for something like that for some time, since some kind of EDRMS
is being required of public authorities and small businesses in the UK as a
result of the Freedom of Information Act, tremors produced by
Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II etc. and just good corporate governance in general.
Seeing that most of the planet appears still to be using MS Office to
generate its documents, we were looking for something which could not only
allow us to build a taxonomy and/or thesaurus, but which would also allow us
to select controlled terms and embed them into the Custom Properties of
Office documents, as well as providing some basic form of retention
scheduling and a facility to search on those Custom Properties.

Now, there are some very good taxonomy/thesaurus builder applications out
there, most coming out of the States, but two good ones in particular coming
out of Australia: a.k.a. and Term Tree/inteRM CFS.  Whether the costs of
these meet the criterion implied in 'poor man's EDMS' is for the potential
purchaser to decide, but for what it's worth, we find that Term Tree/inteRM
CFS does exactly what we were looking for and does it well.  We are, of
course, always interested to hear of other products that can do the same
sort of thing.

Thanks for listening.

Best regards,

Bob

  >>>>>Bob Bater<<<<<
>>Principal Associate<<
>>InfoPlex Associates<<
  >>>>Bristol, UK<<<<

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