Semantic technoogy tools and technology

[FirstLight]

There's an array of tools and platforms for developing and managing semantic asserts - including those that manage terminology, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs,knowledge-graph mining, and more. It is not unusual to get easily confused about how one relates to another, how they can or cannot be used together, their specific purpose, limits, capabilities, and their differences, Please use this forum to discuss any of them.

Regards,
Michael

[LarryKunz]

Having seen it demo-ed, but not having used it yet, my impression is that Pool Party (https://www.poolparty.biz/taxonomy-experts/) has an excellent tool for creating, updating, and applying taxonomies for structured content. I also know that SDL Tridion Docs has unveiled, or will soon unveil, a nifty connector to the Pool Party product.

Has anyone used the Pool Party tool? Would you be willing to comment on its strengths and weaknesses?

[FirstLight]

I have PoolParty and have used it, so I am biased. It is a wonderful platform. It integrates taxonomy, ontology, and knowledge graphs in a single user interface. It also provides for enterprise collaboration which I believe is essential to weave content models and engineering models together at scale. A couple of the reasons we've gone for PoolParty is the simplicity of the interface - but it also deep, it supports all of the key standards, is extensible with APIs, provides for autoclassification (aka PowerTagging) of taxonomy to content, has a neat card-sorting feature for brainstorming creation of taxonomy then darg-and-drop to build the taxonomy, and can mine the content to discover terms/concepts that one might want to consider adding to a taxonomy - with ranking. There are other good ones out there (SmartLogic has been around a long time, along with several others). There are good competitive comparisons out on the web feature-by-feature.

Yes, SDL did integrate PoolParty with its Tridon CMS - the quick peek I've seen of the custom UI looked impressive; I hope to get a better look at CIDM ConVex when they present. Hopefully, other CMS vendors will catch on and do similar so that we don't have to "roll-out-own" integrations and make these systems sing in harmony.

Heather Hedden wrote the book "The Accidental Taxonomist). It's a great read with good references to semantic tools and tech. In fact, I've asked Heather if she'd come and speak with the guild in June - and it's tentatively on the calendar.

Regards,
Michael

[david]

Having seen it demo-ed, but not having used it yet, my impression is that Pool Party (https://www.poolparty.biz/taxonomy-experts/) has an excellent tool for creating, updating, and applying taxonomies for structured content. I also know that SDL Tridion Docs has unveiled, or will soon unveil, a nifty connector to the Pool Party product.

Has anyone used the Pool Party tool? Would you be willing to comment on its strengths and weaknesses?

All I've used is Pool Party so I can't compare it to Protege or anything else but I thought it was simple enough for a beginner like myself. I will say that most of my classmates didn't like it due to the UI and slow-ish response but that's mostly because our server was in Europe. I believe they have stateside servers and from what I've seen from screenshots of the other programs out there they all seem to be pretty similar when it comes to UI. Functionality it was really easy to create and update taxonomies.

[FirstLight]

Having seen it demo-ed, but not having used it yet, my impression is that Pool Party (https://www.poolparty.biz/taxonomy-experts/) has an excellent tool for creating, updating, and applying taxonomies for structured content. I also know that SDL Tridion Docs has unveiled, or will soon unveil, a nifty connector to the Pool Party product.

Has anyone used the Pool Party tool? Would you be willing to comment on its strengths and weaknesses?

Hi Larry,

I've been testing PoolParty now for almost a year now and just acquired it for Avalara. I did a very deep competitive and detailed analysis of the various options, and there are some very good ones from SmartLogic (Semaphore), Topquadrant (TopBraid EDG), and others - they are all impressive and extremely powerful (and then you get even deeper into other graph databases like Neo4J that will make your head spin). What I liked most about PoolParty (and they aren't compensating me for saying positive things), is how well and simply it seamlessly integrates taxonomy, ontology, and knowledge graphs (with its own KG DB) all on one simple interface. It can get folks started fast with taxo by mining existing content, generating sortable cards, then drag and drop to build a taxonomy with ease. Then of course there's autoclassification (what they call PowerTagging). it's a different approach to what we used at IBM with Watson machine learning to auto classify content at scale (it required a bit of training first), but both are equally effective. I can share more of my findings offline.

One of the things fr my shop is the tool will be used by everyone in a collaborative model including all domains of content, marketing, engineering, finance, and many more areas where we want to leverage cross-mining of intelligence and achieve consistency.

Yes, SDL (now RWS) did in fact integrate PoolParty - and it looks really cool. I can't wait to see it live next week at ConVex and has some really probing questions. I know of others that are doing similar- the race is on! We win! Whoohoo! The cCMS my org uses, IXIASOFT, just made applying taxonomy labels easy for writers. What I'm REALLY looking for is for the vendors to milk auto-classification - not only for initial labeling but to automate taxonomy for semantic change management - initial labeling is not the hard part - the devil is that the taxos are constantly expanding and changing, thus we need to update the content labels. Now imagine having to do that manually, at scale - YIKES! And let's go further, we want to label not only maps and topics, but reusable elements like a set of steps in a task article - then we use it to automate the delivery of precision and dynamic answers to chatbots, support agents, etc instead of the nutty and stupid decision trees people are using. DITA users benefit more as you know because we get natural DOM containers (and we can even use <DIV> to span bigger chunks and label them for machine retrieval, assembly, arrangement, and delivery. Now you see the potential scale of labeling and the nightmare that awaits without auto-classification for change management.

I hope this is useful ..we'll chat more directly and I am certain with the rest of the guild about all of this.

Regards,
Michael