42,000 enterprise taxonomies and counting

It's revealing that the cover image of a how-to book on designing enterprise taxonomies is the Biblical Tower of Babel. You remember how well that project turned out.

Maybe it's better not to start from scratch like the builders from the Bible. Buy your taxonomy.

That's the advice of Ross Leher, CEO of Wand Inc. in Denver. He says, "People are not happy with enterprise search because it's not bringing back the relevance people want."

His company began building taxonomies for products and services back in 1983. It now has 42,000 types. Odds are one covers your business.

Industry-specific taxonomies abound, so you may balk at getting yours from a generalist. Leher argues his taxonomies benefit from Wand's cross-relationship structure for terms.

Part of the problem is that taxonomies require users to enter specific terms to get to the documents they seek, he says. But Leher says Wand's cross-relationship approach lets you find the right information with whatever terminology users employ.

For example, the CFO's office search of enterprise source material for budget-forecasting purposes might find useful documents in a software license repository, while the CIO's office might search the same source for renewal dates for upgrade planning. Each person uses the terminology of their domain to get to the same content, but for different purposes.

Wand adds around 1,500 new products and service types per year. And its extended term list used in cross-relationship searches-now more than 1 million-will probably gain another 250,000 entrants in the next twelve months.

Pricing is implementation specific.