Flying a Kite - Starting a Taxonomy

For Christmas, I got this wonderful book about the Brooklyn Bridge. It is called "The Great Bridge" by David McCullough. One part, he wrote about the first bridge to cross the Niagara Gorge built by Charles Ellet. The way Ellet started the bridge was to offer five dollars the first American boy who could fly a kite over to the Canadian side of the gorge. The bridge span was 1,010 feet, and young Homer Walsh won the prize. Ellet took the kite string that spanned the gorge, and tied successively heavier cords and pulled them across the gorge until he had a heavy cable spanning the gorge and from that he built his bridge.

This story reminded me of our team's first efforts of building a business taxonomy. We started with a simple flat set of categories, and then added a second set of categories. After that we migrated to hierarchical trees, and then to banyans, and today we are ever adding features and complexity to our business taxonomy. But we could not have gotten to where we are today, unless we had first tried our first simple solution to span our own problem.

Banyan provides an interesting view on our data.

The folks at Ongig.com, a new video enhanced job site, asked for some of our data to see who are the top 25 most efficient Tech companies based on profit per employee. The winner is SanDisk followed by Google and Apple.

http://ongig.com/blog/wall-street/profit-per-employee-tech#more-1399

We were able to easily provide this because our chief taxonomist had created a top level node in our industry tree called Information Technology which has child nodes for Computer Manufacturers, Software Companies, Electronic Information, and IT Consultants. All these nodes have other parents elsewhere in the tree, but the Banyan helps pull it all together.

I would also like to add a comment by Leo Meerman from LinkedIn. He mentioned that what I call a "Banyan Tree" is better known as a "Polyhierarchy".

Requirements for a better Business Taxonomy Part 4

My last post talked about how we can categorize a company in three different ways:  1) Who their customers or audience are. 2). How they serve their clientele. 3). What business need do they fulfill for their clientele. This is what I have heard called a faceted taxonomy. But I prefer it to be called a multidimensional taxonomy. Now we must ask ourselves are there anymore dimensions which could be useful. Our team has found one which is a little goofy. This is what I call the channel dimension. A company will provide a service, but with all these new means of reaching clients via mobile or internet. Maybe we can have a small domain which defines these different ways of reaching people. So for our example of healthcare EMR software, this company could channel their services through licensed software installed at the client, or via a subscription of hosted software also known as Software as a Service (SaaS). Could anyone think of another useful dimension for a Business Taxonomy?

Requirements for a better Business Taxonomy Part 1

Most business taxonomies, I have seen, are hierarchical with parent and child relationships. A good example may be cloud computing. The term is new and kind of vague, but it can be divided into various sub categories like cloud computing hosting like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure which will host virtual machines on the cloud, or cloud computing infrastructure services like cloud based backup services or antivirus services. However, if you see a cloud application that is specially oriented towards a given vertical like Healthcare which has special requirements like HIPPA, do you want to create a cloud subcategory for healthcare. What if there is a licensed software which manages Electronic Medical Records and is HIPPA compliant but does not run in the cloud. Do you create a subcategory for Healthcare under licensed software too? Then how do you find all the HIPPA compliant solutions? It seems that you need to categorize businesses in multiple ways. In effect, you should have a multi-dimensional hierarchical taxonomy to be able to better categorize and hence find businesses in any database. More on what these categories should be in my next post!