Business Uses of Tags: Raytheon’s Approach

On the Taxonomy Community of Practice list, Christine Connors talked about what she’s doing with tagging (aka folksonomies):

We use a hybrid approach at Raytheon, and it works great. We have folks submit URLs with the keywords they would tag the resource with. A team of librarians then takes a look at the submission, corrects for spelling mistakes, adds additional terms, and approves the item for production (search and sent to the webmaster of that site for addition to the meta data.) We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission.

In search, we insert Suggested Sites in a “feature” box to the right of the regularly ranked results. We do not allow these suggestions to affect the ranking determined by the algorithm. Our surveys show that the sites submitted via this process repeatedly rank as the result deemed “best” for the user’s query. It is the single best thing we’ve done. I can’t tell you how much we’ve spent on formal taxonomies, but suffice it to say that it’s enough for me to wonder why I haven’t gone into business for myself!

Why does it work? Chiefly because the sites submitted are specific to a group or discipline, and no matter how hard we try, having a degree in library science does not give you a degree in engineering (insert discipline here). We do not speak their vernacular. We do well enough to add value with controlled terms, but these folk tags have a life of their own.

These tags are a fantastic resource – user warrant – for keeping the controlled vocabularies up-to-date. They provide us feedback we could get no other way. Given the ease with which people can tag things – and yes, we could argue about whether there should be some cognitive burden for quality’s sake – we gain a unique
insight via this process.

Are you using tagging in your business? If so, how?