Without a guiding context you can never be sure how a word used as a tag was meant

5-Apr-2010, I posted the following:

On March 23, 2010, the German speaking site carta.info published an interview with Prof. Peter Kruse about complexity and the net.

The following quote (my own translation) supports BizSphere’s knowledge management methods and user interface ideas, which aim to reduce the firehose of information (that marketing departments in B2B companies provide for salespeople and channel partners plus what web 2.0 / enterprise 2.0 add) to what is relevant for a specific sales situation:

“…on the web, people use language way too undisciplined. Without a guiding context you can never be sure how a word used as a tag was meant. What’s the tag ‘drama’ worth, when one person tags pages from divorce lawyers because he is currently experiencing drama in his marriage and another person tags certain theatre productions in his city?”

In the BizSphere Sales Enablement solution we do allow ‘free tagging’ but in addition, we force content, contacts, comments, etc. to be tagged in a defined enterprise language – the context. For example, the intersection points of the following taxonomies – or tagging dimensions – create a clearly defined space for all relevant sales information to “live in”:

• products, services and solutions
• information types
• regions and countries

Thanks to the tagging dimensions being defined specifically for each enterprise, they can be used as a common enterprise language – even across different mother tongues. The benefits for the seller are simple yet effective: Searching for information supported by a commonly agreed semantic enterprise language delivers the results which are making sense in a certain sales context. This is something a classical search approach can’t deliver.