Publications

Unhappy with internal corporate search? : learn tips and tricks for building a controlled vocabulary ontology

Arpin, Bettina K.; Miller, Jennifer L.

Are your employees unhappy with internal corporate search? Frequent complaints include: too many results to sift through; results are unrelated/outdated; employees aren't sure which terms to search for. One way to improve intranet search is to implement a controlled vocabulary ontology. Employing this takes the guess work out of searching, makes search efficient and precise, educates employees about the lingo used within the corporation, and allows employees to contribute to the corpus of terms. It promotes internal corporate search to rival its superior sibling, internet search. We will cover our experiences, lessons learned, and conclusions from implementing a controlled vocabulary ontology at Sandia National Laboratories. The work focuses on construction of this ontology from the content perspective and the technical perspective. We'll discuss the following: (1) The tool we used to build a polyhierarchical taxonomy; (2) Examples of two methods of indexing the content: traditional 'back of the book' and folksonomy word-mapping; (3) Tips on how to build future search capabilities while building the basic controlled vocabulary; (4) How to implement the controlled vocabulary as an ontology that mimics Google's search suggestions; (5) Making the user experience more interactive and intuitive; and (6) Sorting suggestions based on preferred, alternate and related terms using SPARQL queries. In summary, future improvements will be presented, including permitting end-users to add, edit and remove terms, and filtering on different subject domains.