Exponential growth in the knowledge captured by the web led to developments in search technology between the late eighties and today. Hence, a perception that information management practices were redundant was created. Concomitantly, many argued that applying formal knowledge management models would constrict the rate at which the web expanded.
Spending time, money or expertise to publish subject matter in structured format fell out of favor. Instead, content would be discovered through search engine optimized copy and links. The cracks in how information was published on the web were aggravated by the practice of stuffing Meta tags with keywords. Though the emergence of this behavior was an offset of Google’s pre-eminent role as a search engine, it also put the spotlight on how people linked and browsed the web.
Nevertheless, organizations have begun discussing investing in subject metadata, tagging and knowledge graphs. The renewed interest is because of the greater emphasis placed by organizations on the value of analytics, innovative search engine optimization approaches, and moving beyond free text search for websites.
Furthermore, organizations today, have the capability to build for their own information needs and unlock the business data trapped inside the flat text in content management systems. The ability to turn flat text into data and insights is a paradigm shift from the capability organizations had of converting structured data into content and insights. Typically, it entails investing in describing the content and managing controlled vocabularies.
Nevertheless, there are principles and ideas that information scientists have been practicing for years that can help organizations large and small. Therefore, this renewed interest in subject description is a welcome development. It will lead to organizations realizing it is harder to do well than it might first appear and not something that can be solved by throwing technology at the problem.
Click here to read the original article.
Please give your feedback on this article or share a similar story for publishing by clicking here.
