Tag as you search?

Today I attended a seminar hosted by the Boston KM Forum on categorization and tagging.  One of the speakers, David Hobbie, brought up a great point - that tagging / categorizing in the enterprise happens when a document is saved into the content management system, when a better way would be to have people tagging documents as they find them in search results.  The first scenario – tag on upload – involves questions such as Which version do you tag?  How can other users tag and rate?  The second scenario – tag on search – accounts for these issues and will lead to richer search results in the future.  I’m not advocating doing away with tag-on-upload, but I’d like to see Hobbie’s idea implemented in the enterprise applications used by my clients.

 

Last night I attended a talk on Enterprise Search from Microsoft by Tara Seppa at the New England SharePoint User Group.   Microsoft emphasizes the value of SharePoint’s “actionable search results” (by which they mean “preview helpful summary information and clear graphical representations of files; move, delete, copy, and drag & drop files; send, forward and reply to messages directly from search results, and open and run applications from the results”). The tag-as-you-search concept would be great functionality to add to future releases of SharePoint Search.

David’s blog:

http://caselines.blogspot.com/

New England SharePoint User Group:

http://www.clearwaypartners.com/SUGHome.htm

KM forum topic:

http://kmforum.org/blog/?p=70

Actionable search results definition from the whitepaper Microsoft’s Approach to Enterprise Search:  Bridging the Gap between Information Management and Enterprise Search

Comments

[Martin Muldoon]

Hello,

We are a Microsoft partner that pioneered tagging through search. Let me know if you'd be interested in a demo.

Cheers!
Martin
www.ba-insight.net

[Ralph Poole]

Do you have any evidence that users will tag as they search? I understand tagging as you search with in the context of a service like del.icio.us, but I find it more difficult to envision users tagging as they search in a KM system. Please explain your approach.

[sadalit]

Ralph, this could be accomplished in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes. The use case I can imagine is a lawyer or strategy consultant looking for good examples of work that has been done for a subset of businesses in a particular industry. Documents might already be tagged by their major vertical, but the user may want to tag them with a sub-industry classification that might not belong to a standardized list. I'll ask David Hobbie to weigh in as well.

[David Hobbie]

My vision of tagging as you search is for federated enterprise search that spans multiple repositories. It could be very difficult, and perhaps close to impossible, to integrate one tagging system within the depths of multiple complex legacy systems such as time & billing, intranet, matters, and document management systems, within any reasonable time frame. Tagging within our DMS is particularly important and difficult for us. However, if items from each of those systems was exposed through search, then the users would potentially tag them at the time they were viewed.

There is no evidence from my firm as we have not implemented any such enterprise tagging. My thought is that people start tagging in order to help themselves find and re-find content, and my hope is that the same impetus will lead to adoption of tagging by a sufficient number of users to add significant value to our enterprise content.

[David Hobbie]

Another point--

It makes a huge difference in the enterprise if you can tag other people's content and provide your perspective on it. That's not going to happen if you can only tag on save.