Industry Watch: Convera introduces Taxonomy Workbench

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, according to Convera. 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.

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 Dec. 17, 2002, the legislation requires compliance by Dec. 17, 2004.

The new product makes taxonomy creation easy for a broad range of users by:

• Developing completely new taxonomies--To ensure an agency's particular needs are met, the Workbench helps create an easily searched organization structure for each agency's 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 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.

• 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.

In other Convera news, the company has announced a partnership with Percussion Software in which Percussion will deploy Convera's RetrievalWare search technology for the content delivery environments based on its Rhythmyx 5 enterprise content management system and its recently introduced Express Portal.

The companies say that working in those content delivery environments, RetrievalWare will provide scalable, advanced search capabilities from simple to complex, aggregated delivery channels, scaling as required to meet an organization's needs. The search technology supports a wide range of content types and sources including text, video and audio files, HTML, XML and more than 200 proprietary document formats, making it well-suited for Internet, intranet, extranet and portal applications