Tom Reamy is, to many of us, one of the authorities on taxonomies. He’s talking right now about the varieties of taxonomy/text analystics software available now, and how to choose which is best for your application & organization.   All the vendors are adding more text analytics. So…step number one is: how are you going to use the technology?  Text mining? business inteligence? cusomter intelligence? tfor facted navigation? keyword indexing? to browse the front end of the portal?

Evaluating Taxonomy Software:

new, copy, rename, delee, merge scop notes spell check search names & identifiers versioning ease of use user documentation visualiztion — how does it show things? automatic taxonomy/node generation — Tom says it’s nonsense but can be used at different stages, especially to get suggestions within a node or for entity extraction entity extraction auto-catgorization (training sets, terms, rules, advanced – saved search queries) “near” sentence” “paragraph” boolean search that allows you to search for x near y, and “not” advanced features — sentiment analysis (for customer service to see what people are saying about them); facts, ontologies, semantic web, etc…..

Phew!  If you want taxonomy management only, you are probably in a small company with a specialized taxonomy – and the good news is that this type of software is quite affordable. But do check the upgrade path for this type of tool, just in case you need to grow the application.Advanced application platforms, sich as Attensity’s or Inxight’s, are for those appls that need to integrate search

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