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Need help with metadata?

Consultants, vendors, or education? Consultants can help you navigate organizational minefields, fill staffing gaps, and help “sell” your ideas to senior managers. But you pay for the time it takes them to learn your business, and your permanent staff may lack the skills or resources to maintain, update, and deploy their work after they move on. Vendors offer assistance during the sales process, via technical support, and through their own consulting staff. But what if you’re not sure which vendor to choose? How do you avoid unanticipated costs for metadata migration and conversion when it’s necessary to change vendors? How do you ensure that metadata stored in one proprietary format can be used in other applications? Education is often the most practical, flexible, and cost-effective option, especially if the learner is a knowledge champion or metadata evangelist, the deliverables include a live demonstration using data from a high priority business process, and assistance is available to turn the lab pilot into a production system.

■ Case studies. Two – three-hour teleconference presentations by practitioners in a small group, roundtable format. Example: “Good to great search”

■ Short tutorials. Three-hour teleconference lecture/demo/discussions on current topics of interest. Example: “How to add a thesaurus to SharePoint search”

■ How-to tutorials. Six – nine-hour teleconference lecture/demo/discussions spread over three consecutive days. Example: “Taxonomies, Search & SharePoint How-to” Occasionally this session is offered as a face-to-face session.

■ Lab courses. Semester-length virtual practicum where one or more people from the same organization work to create controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies for a specific business application under the guidance of a seasoned practitioner.

Lab courses: How they work
In the lab courses, you proceed at your own pace, use your own data, and work on a problem of significance to your organization. For best results, at least one of the participants should be a knowledge champion or metadata evangelist capable of identifying needs that fall outside his/her organizational boundaries.

Participants typically spend 40 – 80 hours on each course. Time can be minimized if a team is used to divide up the tasks, participants understand the business problem, lab data is readily available, and data import is used instead of manual data entry. Deliverables include a printed course book and lab guide plus:

■ Live, Web-based demonstration of a topic hierarchy, A – Z subject index, glossary of terms, a list of authors or experts, and name authorities (standardized names for people, organizations, and products);

■ Exported metadata in Excel format for use in any metadata management software;

■ Sample XML exports in semantic web formats SKOS (thesaurus standard) and OAI (library catalog standard);

■ Final report including peer comments on the demonstration, lessons learned, and recommended next steps.

From pilot to production
As an option, lab course participants may contract with Montague Information Technology LLC (a sister company) for a custom version of the lab software, including custom XML export formats. Call Jean Graef at (423) 968-5584 for a free demo of the Web-based lab.