Ontology management, taxonomy development

Posted 10/18/2007 on kmworld.com

Teragram has unveiled Semantic Term Manager (STM) 2.0, software that enables management of content and maintenance of ontologies in enterprise content repositories and databases. STM 2.0 is designed to help corporate librarians maintain ontologies and integrate this information directly with Teragram's TK240 taxonomy management tool. The combination of these two programs allows knowledge workers to maintain metadata across repositories and databases and to automatically tag documents according to the defined taxonomies. These tools help to simplify the enterprise search and retrieval process, says the company.

Teragram cites STM 2.0's ability to maintain information in different authority lists in the enterprise and build relationships between them. For instance, the company reports, a corporate librarian could easily manage relationships between terms in the sales lead database (i.e. primary contacts, companies and locations) and cross-reference this with a list of internal salespeople and their territories. Further, Teragram explains, STM 2.0 creates a uniform approach to tagging content across different divisions in a large company. For example, Teragram suggests, if a pharmaceutical development lab maintains a database of drugs, diseases and side effects, several research scientists can log in to make changes to the database. An administrator approves or rejects these changes, allowing the information to be updated as it is generated by the people working in the field.

STM 2.0 works in tandem with Teragram's TK240 taxonomy management program. Information stored in the STM 2.0 database can be exported to Teragram's database management tool, TK240, to build complex taxonomies, which can be used to automatically categorize documents and to extract entities and events from documents.