Overview

Businesses that use the portal technologies possess scaleable, flexible, and customizable web-based architectures to create single integration points for enterprise applications and content. For content delivery, most portals ship with powerful search engines and the ability to build hierarchial taxonomies to house internal and external document repositories.

Many portal customers are finding taxonomy construction processes to be difficult to manage and are finding it even more difficult to build consensus when trying to implement an enterprise taxonomy. Furthermore, even in those cases where a taxonomy has been implemented, users frequently complain that documents are not “where they should be” in the directory structure.

Many vendors are now offering semantic enhancement tools that leverage an ontology rather than a taxonomy as a classification schema. Ontologies are descriptions of concepts and relationships between various objects. For example, content may be divided into concepts such as “country” or “financial status”. Those two concepts could have complex relationships between them and other concepts found in the ontology.

More information is available in PDF.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Dale Tuttle
Project Performance Corporation
703-748-7000
dtuttle@ppc.com