A Toolset for Information Chaos

I work with a broad toolset.

Metadata Schema Design and Implementation

I design metadata schemas that drive the desired/preferred/expected information experience of content users as they seek, find and are presented with co-related content to further both their tasks and the business goals of the organization. Metadata schemas are one of the key elements in building the slice of the ontological world - their world - that the user wants to be in at that moment.

Content modeling, taxonomy, the search engine relevance profile (what content fields and their relative weights), fields presented as an individual search result, business rules for content presentation etc. are all points in the content supply chain that require being viewed throgh the lens of a robust metadata schema.

Enterprise Search Strategy and Optimization

I specialize in –

• vendor selection (and designing the matrices of parameters for comparison)
• project design
• management models – e.g. I’ve been extensively involved in setting up and developing a Search “Center of Excellence” (COE) model
• configuring the search engine ontologically/semantically – e.g. by re-using taxonomy and metadata, deriving engine-generated metadata, building synonym expansion and other dictionaries

Much of the semantic and ontological work, as well as supporting content analysis, is application independent.  I have extensive experience in FAST ESP - and its wider product set - and IBM OmniFind, and of Documentum, in the CMS layer of the enterprise content supply chain.

Enterprise Search Migration

One of the most complex, and fraught, projects in managing your enterprise search deployment is migrating from an existing to a new enterprise search platform. I have deep experience implementing search migration successfully, and in how to quantify the new user experience over the old.

Findbility and the Presentation Layer

Understanding users and content are the pre-requisites for search-generated content presentation that provides the facts and figures that users both need and expect.  I provide strategy, design, data analysis and implementation on –

• Content Analysis – what topics, editorial types, audiences, etc.
• Content Modeling – what content artifacts together constitute, for example, a product description, a description of a line of business, and so on