”Bug’s-Eye” View or a “Bird’s-Eye” Perspective?
With navigation, which consists of a predefined list of categories and quantification for the information available within them, knowledge workers can solve two problems: discovery and scope. For many companies, satisfying business inquiries, meeting compliance regulations and minimizing risk is critical, but they can't do this effectively and accurately without the information they need. What's needed is a systematic approach to information discovery, no matter its source or format, giving enterprises the ability to discover information instantly whether it resides in the enterprise or on the Web.
Also, by providing bug's-eye and bird's-eye views, navigation addresses scope. Without the full scope of information, knowledge workers don't have an accurate picture of the data needed to make business decisions so the quality of decisions, creative output and productivity suffers. Most (if not all) knowledge workers have a preconceived notion of navigation but still find unrealized value in the ability to truly explore/discover what you need.
Tags and Facets as Metadata
Tags are metadata describing asset, subject, usage and relational properties of digital assets. Examples include:
Title: "Bleak House"
Creator: "Dickens, Charles"
Facets are metadata attributes whose values form a near-orthogonal set of controlled vocabularies, together forming a coordinate system. Examples include:
Subject: Arsenic, Antimony
Location: World > USA > California > Pasadena
By adding tags and facets to content and data, faceted navigation enables new value chains to emerge on the Web and within enterprises, benefiting different communities of interest:
Publishers: User-generated metadata that increases the value of core content and data offerings.
Contributors (enthusiasts, editors, remixers, librarians): Tools for remixing, tagging, annotating and playlisting content and data.
Consumers: Navigable rich data and content.
Advertisers: Higher-yield ads based on paid navigation rather than paid search.
Metadata efforts within the enterprise have achieved mixed results. There have been primarily three approaches: top down, bottom up, or give up and install Google Enterprise. The resulting attitude has been "now that we've got it, what do we do with it?" Faceted navigation creates a framework to bridge the gap between metadata and the user, specifically allowing the IT department to leverage the metadata which is at hand in increasing amounts, use open standards to stitch things together, exploit implicit (usage) and explicit (subject) user-generated metadata without forcing governance up front and empowering individuals and small teams to build navigation applications quickly and refine them incrementally.
Navigating Health News
Environmental Health News (EHN) is a news site run by EHS designed to increase the public's understanding of environmental issues and their effects on human health.
Before Siderean, EHS faced a significant information management problem as its archive of information grew to an unmanageable size of 70,000 articles. Before Siderean, this content was posted to the site and sorted and categorized daily by hand. Over time, it became extremely difficult to continue to sort, categorize, manage and present this content to readers and journalists in a valuable way and users became increasingly frustrated by not being able to quickly find what they needed. This led EHS to look for a solution that traditional search could not address: improving navigation across the site; and improving how information was categorized and presented so it could be retrieved with pinpoint, repeatable results.
With Siderean, EHS now has improved navigation and tagging capabilities so journalists can easily scan the large volume of structured and unstructured content on their topic of interest before drilling down. With Siderean, EHS is also able to syndicate content for other Web sites and publish its content to other sites, expanding its reach and usability as the premier source for environmental health information. Visit their site at http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/.
Siderean Software helps people view and explore the full scope of enterprise and Web-based content available on a topic for thorough, fast and flexible inquiries. Our open Web-based tools gather, analyze and organize all kinds of structured and unstructured digital content, presenting it in a single, unified navigation view that dynamically displays content in context. Founded in 2001, Siderean is backed by leading investment firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures. For more information please visit Siderean (
www.siderean.com)