Closing the Knowledge Gap: A Case Study – How Cisco Unlocks Communications by Tony Frazier, Director of Product Management, Cisco Systems and David Fishman, Marketing, Lucid Imagination.
From the post:
Cisco Systems set out to build a system that takes the search for knowledge beyond documents into the content of social network inside the enterprise. The resulting Cisco Pulse platform was built to deliver corporate employees a better understanding who’s communicating with whom, how, and about what. Working with Lucid Imagination, Cisco turned to open source — specifically, Solr/Lucene technology — as the foundation of the search architecture.
…
Cisco’s approach to this project centered on vocabulary-based tagging and search. Every organization has the ability to define keywords for their personalized library. Cisco Pulse then tags a user’s activity, content and behavior in electronic communications to match the vocabulary, presenting valuable information that simplifies and accelerates knowledge sharing across an organization. Vocabulary-based tagging makes unlocking the relevant content of electronic communications safe and efficient.
You need to read the entire article but two things to note:
- No uniform vocabulary: Every “organization” created its own.
- Automatic tagging: Content was automatically tagged (read users did not tag)
The article doesn’t go into any real depth about the tagging but it is implied that who created the content and other information is getting “tagged” as well.
I read that to mean in a topic maps context that with the declaration of a vocabulary and automatic tagging, that another process could create associations with roles and role players and other topic map constructs without bothering end users about those tasks.
Not to mention that declaring equivalents between tags as part of the reading/discovery process might be limited to some but not all users.
An incremental or perhaps even evolving authoring of a topic map.
Rather than a dead-tree resource, delivered a fait accompli, a topic map can change as new information or new views of existing/new information are added to the map. (A topic map doesn’t have to be so useful. It can be the equivalent of a dead-tree resource if you really want.)