Feds prepare taxonomy software

Government agencies will expend a lot of effort in 2004 preparing to implement taxonomy technologies for organizing enterprise information, but it may not be enough to meet a year-end deadline for establishing a taxonomy system, an analyst said.

Agencies can accomplish their goals, but coming up with taxonomies for organizing information is a challenging task, said Rita Knox, research director and vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.

Taxonomies are ways of classifying and organizing data to make it easier to search and access. Section 207 of the 2002 E-Government Act requires agencies to develop an overall taxonomy for public Web sites by the end of 2004.

Government agencies should have process experts and domain experts, such as library scientists, working on their taxonomy systems if they want them to be effective, Knox said. If agencies rely solely on automatic category creation tools, their taxonomy projects are likely to fail, she said.