To paraphrase Patrick Lambe (yet again): Building classification schemes is at the same time deceptively simple and fiendishly complicated. It's deceptively simple because it's one of those tasks that you can just start by putting terms into a spreadsheet, or into the...
Metadata, like the electrical grid and the highway system, fades into the background of everyday life, taken for granted as just part of what makes modern life run smoothly. When metadata is doing its job well it fades into the background, almost to the point of being...
2020 was a year like no other – a year of massive change forced upon as we collectively reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Much has been written about the way in which we adapted to our changing circumstances, in particular, the need to pivot our business models to...
When you're pushing a particular barrow, it's good to validate your arguments. So, over the holidays, I caught up with a few Gartner reports to confirm their take on the link between metadata and digital transformation. I’ve extracted a few (not so random) quotes, so...
Over the past few months a remarkable collaboration has taken place between three parties: Pingar NZ, Synercon Australia and our client Auckland Transport. We each brought existing knowledge and toolsets, which we combined to build an Intelligent Automation platform...
Even information professionals need a helping hand to appraise and classify the growing document stockpile. Not surprising then that most organisations we work with have reached the same point where autoclassification is the only viable solution to appraise, capture...
Classification is the means by which we can build a structured metadata model around our unstructured information, enabling us to identify, find, provide access, protect, retain and dispose of it, rigorously and consistently. This one day workshop is designed to...
Managing metadata and developing taxonomies is easy! And so it is – when you are working within a confined context. As Patrick Lambe suggests in his book Organising Knowledge, most people are confident in building taxonomies i.e. lists, lookup sets, hierarchies, file...
Take a look at any organisation and you will find thousands of taxonomies in every database and information system across the enterprise expressed in the form of lists, lookup sets, metadata, tags, taxonomies, file plans, classification facets etc… Who’s in control?...
So much to consider regarding automation of recordkeeping practices. It's a subject I've been mulling over for a while now given that the focus of my research is classification and metadata. You can read more about our research with metadata and data models to enable...
The third article in a series of insights about metadata. We’ve talked a lot about language, but language is just one, albeit a big one, of the metadata elements we use to manage information objects. In fact there is a whole range of terms and Identifiers which make...
What exactly is the metadata challenge? As discussed in our insight the language of metadata, using precise and consistent language as a business tool is a vastly different concept to using it as an expression of social behaviour, as a means of differentiation between...
The first in a series of insights about metadata; the challenges, how to use it to your advantage manage it over time. Why do we all get so confused about metadata – after all it’s really just words, right? Right! But how many different ways are there to describe the...
One of the best chapters I've ever read about metadata can be found in Darin Stewart's book 'Building Enterprise Taxonomies'. To quote Stewart: Metadata is a hard sell. It is expensive to create and difficult to maintain. Executives have a tough time understanding how...
February, 2014. Conni's paper has been selected for the IRMS Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom, May 18-20 2104. Here is the precis: We live in a world of technology where process automation is the norm. So why, in 2014,...
Aggregation: a collection: several things grouped together or considered as a whole. I’ve always considered aggregation a cornerstone of records management. Conceptually, aggregations make sense to me – records or “the record” of a particular transaction or event...
You may wonder why anyone would want to spend money on specialist software for building taxonomies or metadata when you could just use a spreadsheet. Here are 5 good reasons: Relationships and mapping There are many more relationships to a taxonomy/thesaurus than...