This workshop covers the art and science to developing information structures that live and work within search and content management systems. This “back-end” information architecture (IA) can make or break your implementation. This session will offer a guide to IA for Web search and CMS and illustrate how different software packages on the market can (and can’t) leverage different aspects of “back-end IA.” Attendees will learn:

• The tactical aspects of IA for search and Web CMS
• How “back-end” IA feeds into front-end user experience
• How different CMS and search solutions use taxonomy and metadata
• Best practices for designing IA for search and Web CMS and some of the pitfalls

This workshop will help you understand what taxonomies are to focus on what you need to know and have to satisfy the underlying business need. The emphasis is that taxonomies are just tools that are deployed to meet a larger purpose. The workshop will concentrate on the who, what, where, when, how, and why of taxonomies and metadata and answer questions such as these:

• What is involved in cre- line benefits of an enterprise taxonomy?
• How do you calculate the ROI on taxonomy development?
• How do you convince managers and staff to take taxonomy seriously in the face of Google?
• How do you implement, support, and maintain a taxonomy?
• How can taxonomies improve your search system?
• What are the fundamental principles that dictate when to use metadata and taxonomy to improve the overall search experience?

Learn the fundamentals about enterprise search engines and get prepared for the intense, in-depth sessions you’ll hear at the conference. Acquire a solid grounding on how search engines work, from indexing to the actual search to the results display, using real-world examples. This workshop covers robot spiders, general index structures, simple query parsing, retrieval, relevance ranking, and designing usable search interfaces. It will explore the three core aspects of enterprise search: search functionality, content searchability, and interface.

Search remains critical to the efficacy of content management systems, but how do ECM and search technologies fit together? While bulging document repositories put new demands on enterprise search, the two disciplines of ECM and search remain quite separate. ECM expert Alan Pelz-Sharpe looks at search in an ECM context, interpreting what’s going on behind the scenes. He will answer such questions as: What types of search technologies do the major ECM suites on the marketplace offer? Where are ECM vendors partnering with search suppliers, and when and why are they rolling out their own? How are large enterprises integrating search and content management strategies? Do you need to invest in a separate search solution if you invest in ECM?

What are the various ways that taxonomy can be applied to search? Faceted search is one, but what are others? Since a taxonomy is a core organizing principle of a content management application and related search tools, there are numerous ways to influence search recall and precision by using thesaurus structures and taxonomies. Even search appliances can leverage taxonomies, and integrated search applications can maintain context of federated search using taxonomies. This practical workshop covers a variety of ways that you can integrate and fully leverage large public taxonomies as well as apply small controlled vocabularies in search applications and search systems. You will see examples of advanced and innovative integrated search environments that leverage metadata and taxonomies with various classes of search tools.

The benefits of using metadata to refine search results are well known, but where should metadata be stored—within documents, in the search application, or in some other proprietary application? In this workshop you'll learn about a relatively new feature that allows a search engine to access keywords, categories, and other metadata stored in an external database (metadata repository). Through nontechnical discussion and demos, you'll learn how to create and use metadata repositories, four ways to populate them with data, and how to use them to solve special problems, such as multilingual search, taxonomy maintenance, and data synchronization. The workshop concludes with a review of commercial metadata repository products.