Tools for e-government
Convera reports its new Taxonomy Workbench will help government agencies comply with the E-Government Act of 2002. Through customized taxonomy creation, the Workbench is said to allow agencies to improve the way public information is organized on government Web sites.
A complete set of tools for organizing large amounts of disparate government data, the Taxonomy Workbench reduces the time and expense required to comply with Section 207 of the Act. Using the Workbench to create taxonomies, information managers, librarians and subject matter experts can integrate their collective knowledge and expertise to organize vast quantities of data in an automated environment, says Convera.
The Taxonomy Workbench also addresses another critical mandate in the E-Government Act—the preservation of government information—by classifying diverse data into efficient taxonomies. The Act illustrates how effective taxonomy development is the lynchpin for delivering quick online search results on government Web sites. Signed into law by the President on December 17, 2002, the legislation requires compliance by December 17, 2004. Click here to view an online version of the Act its reference to taxonomies.
The new product makes taxonomy creation easy for a broad range of users by:
Developing completely new taxonomies—customized to an agency's particular needs, the Workbench helps create an easily searched organization structure for each agency's own specific online public information.
Importing existing taxonomies and thesauri—To maintain a simple approach to using data organization models already in place, users can integrate and modify an agency's existing taxonomies or thesauri. Automated import, generation, combination and pruning wizards aid in accelerated taxonomy and classification development.
Testing, benchmarking and tuning taxonomies and classifications—A full suite of taxonomy quality measurement tools helps ensure the general public using a government Web site will not need to search unnecessary layers of data for details they need.
Convera's static and dynamic benchmarking tools significantly reduce the time to create and maintain quality taxonomies, offering measurable ROI. Utilizing a graphical interface, users can highlight certain data, identify taxonomies and simply watch their monitor as the newly created taxonomies are populated by dispersed data. All categorization processes, including normalization, latching, idiom detection, disambiguation and ranking are performed through benchmarking.
Translating human subject area expertise into fast Web site browsing and searching—The Taxonomy Workbench allows agencies to capture the expertise of domain subject experts online by building in-depth methods of search on a particular data set. Multiple users on different development platforms can work simultaneously, yet securely, creating taxonomies and classifications.