More shared research notes for my upcoming KM presentration.
Lawyers absolutely will not cooperate with completing fields, creating or complying with taxonomies, or creating other useful metadata.
The big question: are there ways to “route around” this self-defeating behavior that make more sense the trying to change behavior (which is probably impossible in most firms)?
How about throwing high-horsepower data mining tools at unstructured data?
See Edmunds.com deploy text mining tools for user forum (Ephraim Schwartz)
“In beta trials now, Edmunds.com will be deploying a technology from Attensity called PowerDrill that converts written language into relational data.
PowerDrill takes the unstructured data, namely sentences, and diagrams the sentences placing each part of speech, such as noun phrase, verb phrase, and prepositional phrase, into a separate field, actor, action, and object which can then be used by a standard database to discover relationships and trends.
Although text mining for content intelligence is covered by a number of other companies such as ClearForest Tags, Inxight SmartDiscovery, and IBM WebFountain products, Laura Ramos, vice president at Forrester Research, called Attenisty’s diagram capability unique. ”
AND
“In a test with Honda Odyssey, a highly anticipated 2005 car model, information from drivers of previous model years was tabulated, allowing Edmunds.com to show that the most needed improvements were in road noise, transmission issues, and styling.
Edmunds.com was able to analyze trend information from conversations on the forums, including shopping and dealer behavior, re-occurring issues, and concerns which can also be used to predict future behavior.
Companies such as Edmunds.com as well as government agencies are suddenly waking up to the richness of unstructured data, according to one industry analyst.”
Recall John Gilmore’s “The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.” Might it be that we can treat bad metadata creation behaviors of lawyers as damage that we can (and perhaps should) route around?