Testing taxonomies

• Article 18 of 26
• M-iD, May 2005

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After putting out a request for interest in November 2003, Kent Connects trialled APR Smartlogik's Semaphore product. "One of the requirements was to provide a search engine, but with the rigour of a taxonomy underneath, as well as automatic tagging," says Ralph Sperring, project manager at Kingshurst Consulting, which provided consultancy services for the project. Automated tagging was important, since one member authority alone estimated it would take one employee a month to tag its existing pages manually.

By March 2004, the pilot programme was complete and the various partners all agreed to implement the system. The partnership then created a centralised taxonomy management service to avoid duplication and to achieve a common language the partners could use. Based partly on a taxonomy provided by APR Smartlogik, the taxonomy developed was a mixture of the Government Category List and the Local Government Category List, as well as additional, local categories and synonyms particular to Kent. For metadata tagging the organisation adopted the government's eGIF standard.

With the taxonomy developed, the partners then had to implement it. The number of different content management systems used meant that the partners had to go back to their content management software suppliers to obtain application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect them with the APR Smartlogik system.

Many partners, however, had no content management system and delayed entering the project until they have one, rather than re-index all their content. To avoid system overloads, individual partner web sites are 'spidered' at night - searched by the master system - with batches of pages being categorised at a time until the whole site is within the taxonomy. About one-fifth of pages cannot be automatically spidered, mainly because they have too little text or stray too far from corporate publishing standards to be categorised correctly. Sperring hopes this figure will decrease in time.

As well as improving search facilities for web site users and ensuring the partnership is well on course to meet its e-government targets by the end of the year, the taxonomy has also made it easier for council call centre staff to locate information more quickly when taking calls from the public. Each operative can now take more calls per hour, reducing costs.

With more than two-thirds of partners' sites included in the portal search, Sperring hopes the addition of the remaining one-third by the end of the year will reduce costs further. "Maintaining a taxonomy can be an incredibly large overhead. But as we work on developing a more regional taxonomy, the more people we put in the pot, the more widely it's spread and the cheaper it gets. And customers will still be able to search over a wider area and get similar returns," he says.