A diamond in the rough
A diamond in the rough
Despite having the wonderful resource that is the Internet at our fingertips, finding a certain piece of information can still be as difficult as finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Meta tagging software makes it easier for organisations to keep track of vital data, but is enough known about the full capabilities of the software? Rodney Appleyard reports.
The purpose of meta tagging software is to pinpoint material, buried under a heap of information, through carefully categorising and classifying information. Meta tags are also used by website operators to draw traffic to their sites. The software works intelligently to provide a wealth of data via a simple search.
Pharmaceutical companies, government departments, law firms, educational institutions and businesses big and small are all using meta data more than ever to help them find critical information quickly and easily.
However, according to some analysts, little is known about the true value of meta tagging software and the difference it can make to business operations.
John Brand, senior vice president for technology research services at META Group, believes that most organisations do not really understand how to use the software to the maximum and vendors face the dilemma of having to educate users before they can sell their products.
"Most organisations think that if they just tag all of their content, this will make it easier to find information. But this concept does not take advantage of the full potential of the software. A well organised philosophy needs to be put in place before the tagging begins. "Rules have to be applied so that key information can be found under a variety of different searches. This means that material needs to be categorised and classified thoroughly beforehand, so that the meta tagging software can automatically allocate incoming material into these categories, allowing the user to find information instantaneously.
"An organisation needs to understand the value of creating the settings to enable unstructured content to be discovered effortlessly. Meta tagging software can be applied to find not only urgent information, but also other content relevant to one particular subject."
Brand says some companies waste time by manually inserting meta tags without thinking about how different content is related, which means that the system does not work to expectations, and in some cases, the data has to be inputted in again to achieve better results. He remembers an example of one large government department that did this, and had to spend a year inputting the data all over again, but is not at liberty to name the department concerned.
"This is an example of an organisation not thinking through properly how to tag the data. If you set the rules properly, the meta tagging data software will create the consistency you need to have the documents tagged usefully, which cuts out the manual effort."The main vendors in the market, according to Brand, are Applied Semantics, Recommind, Quiver and Interwoven.
Interwoven's Meta Tagger Content Intelligence Server is one of the most popular meta tagging software products available at the moment.
It has been available for two years and Andrew Antal, Interwoven's alliance and marketing director, says many companies are showing increasing interest with using meta tagging software as a natural enhancement to search engine capabilities.
"Meta tagging is becoming more popular. The key challenge is finding a lot of data stored in a central repository. The Department of Justice has used our meta tagging software to find essential information.
"Users can customise the software to suit their needs by setting rules and characteristics specifically relevant to their repository. It goes hand in hand with our document management system, WorkSite, too. So every time the user enters a document into the system, it is automatically stored into a hierarchical structure.
"Key words are indexed to allow somebody to bring up the document under a number of many different searches in less than thirty seconds."
John Bara, the vice president of marketing at Interwoven, adds: "It is a learning device. You can evolve your taxonomy. I think companies that implement meta data management tools have to think about change management, training, why they are doing it and they have to get the employees on board. These things are not magic pixie dust. They don't just jump out of the box and flip backwards three times. People still have to click on a few boxes when it comes to inputting meta data into the organisation."
Through a systematic and automated process, Interwoven claims that MetaTagger Content Intelligence Server eliminates a large part chunk of the tedious, error-prone task of manually classifying and tagging content with metadata, while at the same time ensuring consistency through the use of controlled vocabularies and business rules.
It integrates with any repository to process all information, including web content, business documents, database records, syndicated feeds, and legacy content archives. In addition, it automatically generates taxonomies based on existing collections of content, which you can then review and modify using simple and powerful visual tools. Brand says that meta tagging software could also have thesaurus terms inputted into it, so that the engine can understand these interpretations.
It seems that the more thought an organisation puts into how it would like to use the software to retrieve information, the more likely the software is to meet expectations in response to this effort. The software has the ability to be taught exactly how to serve the individual searching needs of each organisation.
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