Recently, I have been talking with some software folks who have created parsers for auto-classification. These engines will take a text or website, scan the contents and see how it matches to a given taxonomy. These parsers use a variety of techniques including statistics, semantics, word location to see how a given document matches a taxonomy. These are very impressive, and I hope to use one of these for our taxonomy to classify our content. One of the unique traits of our taxonomy is that is multidimensional, and we use those dimensions to show the different ways that businesses operate in our economy. We have been able to leverage this to find buyers, sellers and comparables for Mergers and Acquisitions. One of the problems with this approach is that users who are searching our database need to have a fairly in depth knowledge of the taxonomy in order to find what they need. To solve this problem, we decided we needed to create meta-terms or coined phrases that would represent different search criteria to apply to our taxonomy. Instead of, going from text to taxonomy we are going from taxonomy to text. We also use all the synonyms for all the nodes in our taxonomy. So instead of having users select their criteria from a series of drop-down boxes, they can type in a Google-like text box and the software will auto-fill matches against the table of coined phrases generated from our taxonomy.
I have a live sample on our MandAsoft site here: http://mandasoft.com/segments/searchlob.aspx. A good example is accountant software which is a coined phrase that will search for software for accountants. Here are the results for that search http://mandasoft.com/segmentview.aspx?SearchID=LOB99.
Tell me what you think.
Follow the exploration on how to build a better taxonomy for business. I believe current taxonomies are currently lacking. Using a spatial concept of taxonomy, our team has built a taxonomy that is used to power research into Comparables for Mergers & Acquisitions in the evolving sector of Information, Software and Media, and I would like to share our thoughts on how to build a better taxonomy.
Showing posts with label multi-dimensional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label multi-dimensional. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
A Multi-Dimensional Quandary - Social Networking
Today our team had an interesting issue come up. As our taxonomy tries to model business, we try to keep on top of how business models evolve, and we find we have to reconsider terms and what they mean. The term that gave us pause today was Social Networking. We use a multi-dimensional taxonomy, where we have four distinct trees that model different aspects of a business and each one roughly answers the following questions: 1) who is the clientele of a business, 2) how does a company do business, 3) what problems does a business solve or subject area it specializes in, and 4) what channel does the business use to reach customers. So our problem was that we had Social Networking defined in our business solution tree, but then we found that Social Networking started to morph into something beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Shopping sites started to incorporate Social Networking into their businesses, and then Social Networking, no longer seemed like an "end: but a "means to an end". So our solution, which is far from the only solution was to add social networking to our channel tree, where it sits along with mobile and online terms. I hate having the same term in multiple trees, but the term is now used in multiple contexts, and we do have repeated terms for different contexts. What are your thoughts?
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