Why Enterprises should embrace Taxonomies and Knowledge Graphs

This Viewpoint is by Nika Mizerski, Product Manager PoolParty Semantic Suite.

Andreas Blumauer, CEO, PoolParty / Semantic Web Company, will be speaking at Taxonomy Bootcamp in Washington DC. His session is titled Dynamic Semantic Publishing. Click here to register.

Digital leadership in disruptive industries

What do Media & Publishing, Financial Services and the Pharma Industry have in common? Their business models strongly depend on digital excellence. Their business success have a strong correlation with their technical execution.

For example, Media & Publishing companies are working hard to personalize and monetize their content. Reducing costs during the content production is equally important to them as organizing the digital assets in a sustainable way for future reuse.

Financial institutions need to provide highly customized product offerings to increase their revenue margins. They possess a valuable information treasure. Unfortunately, a fragmented database landscape prevents relevant customer insights analytics.

Pharma organizations have to innovate fast to stay relevant. Finding experts with a suitable skill set for fields that are not even named and established yet, is a business critical HR responsibility. Cross-departmental knowledge organization is also key for fostering an innovation-driven environment.

Success factor: Bulletproof taxonomy

The specific business challenges vary across these industries. Also the technology solutions in place differentiate according to established industry preferences. However, at the heart of every successful digital transformation program, you will find taxonomies.

Well developed and professionally managed taxonomies are the backbone of a more dynamic information architecture and a prerequisite for smart applications. By designing a specific knowledge domain that also represents complex relationships, you can guarantee that valuable information will be put into relevant context. That's what Google Knowledge Graph does on a large scale and what enterprises should embrace for their specialized and unique ecosystem.  

Myth: Taxonomies are expensive

So why are taxonomies still regularly left out in digital transformation projects?  Building and maintaining a taxonomy is simply considered expensive. This decision usually buries a projects success, even before it`s kick-off.

It is true, that creating a knowledge graph requires a taxonomist and the dedication of subject matter experts. You definitely need a taxonomy management software that you can integrate with your CMS, DMS or CRM. Taxonomy Management is a substantial part of your project.

There is no shortcut to digital excellence. If you go digital, you need to create your own context. Building a taxonomy and mapping your structured and unstructured data with it, is the framework you are looking for.

Human reasoning doesn't work like statistics

An alternative way to improve search functionalities, data analytics applications or personalization services is to apply statistical algorithms. This will only work when you have a large-scale data repository as commercial search engines do. Otherwise, you have to take burdensome inaccuracies into account.

There is a reason why even Google and Yahoo work with knowledge graphs. To provide useful applications, machine-learning must gradually improve. Taxonomies represent how human beings think. There is no substitute for that. Experienced taxonomists have a bright career future ahead of them.

About the author

Nika Mizerski
Product Manager
PoolParty Semantic Suite
n.mizerski@semantic-web.at
www.poolparty.biz