Classification without integration

If you are using a taxonomy management system such as PoolParty to create business taxonomies, you may well be doing so in order to help with classifying your content. To get the best out of that, many organisations carry out some kind of integration between their content management system (CMS) and PoolParty, making use of the comprehensive PoolParty API along with local features in the CMS. Examples of existing integrations include Drupal (you can read about the Drupal module on this site), SharePoint, Umbraco and various others.

But what if you don't have Drupal or SharePoint or Umbraco, and you don't have the resources to create an integration for your particular CMS? There are technical barriers of course. Some CMS products don't have an architecture that allows development of modules or plug-ins. Others have proprietary code that is not accessible by ordinary developers. In my experience this kind of integration causes a lot of difficulties, because of these technical problems but also because of company policies, lack of IT developer resource or other concerns.

There is another point to consider here, particularly if you are building an open knowledge networked environment.  In almost all content management systems, the classification is stored in the CMS. Each CMS uses its own way of doing this, so it's proprietary and often obscure. This means that when you move to a new CMS (it will happen) you will lose all of your classification information. In my experience the migration of content itself presents huge challenges (to the point where many organisations resort to cut-and-paste between two systems) and migrating the tagging is way down the priority list. Also, internal tagging has limited benefits when it comes to building a knowledge network; your other information systems cannot see the classification as it is buried within a proprietary database system.

At Tellura Semantics we've been mulling this issue over for some time now, and we believe that we have come up with a completely different and innovative approach. Our solution is available for use with any CMS because it doesn't require a software based integration, and doesn't store the tags within the content management system. This solution means that:

• Your content classification makes use of all of the rich metadata available in a PoolParty project
• Your content items will be seamlessly connected to other business information, via the classification
• When you move to a different CMS in future, you won't lose your tagging, and you'll still be able to link your content to other information across the business

It's very easy to use; just add the settings for your CMS and for your PoolParty environment, and then start tagging. As you visit or edit a piece of content, TurboTagger will let you point at the content you want to tag, and in real time suggests the most relevant concepts out of PoolParty. Once you've chosen which concepts are the best for this content, the link between the content and the tags is stored away safely outside of your CMS. This means that you don't need to build an intrusive plug-in or module for your CMS, and it also means that it is portable; when you change to another CMS you don't need to lose your tags. You're not even restricted to content management systems, you can use TurboTagger to create classifications between PoolParty and any web-based information system.

So how does it work? We can't share all of the technical details at this point, but very soon we will put a video online that shows exactly how it works. If you think it might be of value to your business, then get in touch and we'll be delighted to talk in more detail about this exciting and innovative new product.