We have started to offer PoolParty as an enterprise vocabulary management system on the commercial market in 2009. Since then we experienced many enlightening moments: As you can imagine, many of those topics focused on the starting points with interested parties for PoolParty. A variety of questions came up when talking about “what is it good for” or “how can I find out if PoolParty could be useful for my organisation”.
In this article we want to share our experience with you, as far as you are interested in learning whether controlled vocabularies like taxonomies or thesauri in general and PoolParty in particular is the right method and tool for you – and for which areas it can be used. We want to discuss some problem-based scenarios that have come up nearly in all our discussions with prospects and customers. At that stage we assume, that you are familiar with PoolParty in a sense that you know its basic functions as a semantic thesaurus management tool.
Application areas for PoolParty
Let’s start with some “problem areas” that are pretty common in many organisations.
- If data integration is a topic in your organisation and there are many different structured or unstructured sources (database, XML, Word, PDF, etc.), you can use PoolParty for bringing the available data onto one common layer that can be addressed by your internal search engine.
- If you have to handle multiple languages or many abbreviations for – let’s say – a product catalogue or a research department you could map the meanings of the data onto unique concepts that include the varying abbreviations. So everybody could use his/her individual special discourse to find common contents.
- If one of your organisation scopes is to act as an information platform with a huge volume of data or many different subtopics you could use PoolParty as a controlled vocabulary system to benefit from categorized auto-complete functions, cross referencing, related topic suggestions for the search results or facetted search with categories. That makes searching not only faster but delivers also much more precise results.
- Find some more Application areas here
The value of data
Besides to the application areas above – if you can answer some of the following questions with yes, you should probably get involved more seriously with the possibilities which PoolParty can offer.
- Make information accessible: Is there any valuable data that is not used yet in a satisfying way because the stakeholders can access it hardly or not at all?
- Link and contextualise information: Is there any data around in your organisation that should be combined with other existing data to create new knowledge by better contextualisation?
- Publish your data as Linked Open Data: Do you want to provide data to other departments or to the public in a format that is not proprietary to build mash ups like for more understandable visualisations?
- Consume data from the semantic web: Would you benefit from using publicly available non-proprietary data like financial figures, geographical information, country profiles or city descriptions?
Yes? Then it’s time to go deeper into preparation…
How to plan a good pilot scenario?
Of course there are several aspects to consider if you are up to do some strategic adoptions concerning your data management. It’s not just about time planning or budget checks – in our opinion it’s probably even more important to have a precise scope already in an early stage.
We have listed some application scenarios before, even if there are many more. Now it’s time to focus on how precise you can describe the field that should be supported by a new approach. Most of the cases we know, there is more than just one person involved in an operative field and not so seldom people have different mental models on the same topics. Take your time and discuss these different approaches and which scope will be considered. This will it make easier to convince your potential sponsor of your plans.
Furthermore ask yourself, which scope would be most attractive to be supported by one (or more) of the application areas above. Try to address a stakeholder group that could benefit most from an improvement like this. Those could be researchers, suppliers, customers, departments or partners.
Start small, think big: don’t hesitate to form a big picture! For example, try to write out a question like “What if we had a search engine that would think in our dimensions?” or “How could our stakeholders benefit most from intelligent tagging suggestions?” and extract the positive consequences.
Last but not least, let us help you! We are used to be faced with situations, when there is not really a clear scope. Sometimes just the problem feels real while a solution seems to be far. We would be glad to attend you with the first steps – anytime, anywhere.
Still not enough so far?
Okay, bring it down to earth and don’t let it be just a storm in the teacup!
- You will find some specification questions for preparing your plans more in detail
- You should subscribe for a PoolParty demo account – hands on. You might be surprised. It’s not a miracle!
- Take your time for the guides and the tutorials on our website. They will help you thinking more semantic
- Get in contact! Let us know what you have in mind. We could meet for a first live demo session as well
All right! So far we are very confident that you are equipped now for the first steps. We also plan to start a user forum for PoolParty in the near future, because we are sure that there are some excellent ideas out there!
Let us know, if there are some crucial points missing in this post!
