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This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and
Exhibition held in Houston, Texas, U.S.A., 26–29 September 2004.
Background
This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE Program Committee following review of
information contained in a proposal submitted by the author(s). Contents of the paper, as
Our company’s previous content management efforts had
presented, have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to evolved from published hard copy content to placing anything
correction by the author(s). The material, as presented, does not necessarily reflect any
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mergers and acquisitions, bringing in more collections of
content which followed different policies regarding creation,
organization and retention. The gains made in sharing were
Abstract lost in information quality, with many authors forgetting about
As companies have begun to share information using intranets their content altogether. Thus, text searches retrieved too
and internets, more information is available than the average much unwanted content that had questionable information.
person can absorb. A simple internet search using any search
engine can return hundreds to thousands of documents that In many websites, content was broadly organized according to
may contain only bits of information that one is required to the content owner’s view of their functional organization.
integrate into useful knowledge. Successful implementation of Once written, content was typically sent to a web
internet and intranet portals, knowledge management, and administrator for actual placement in the system, a step that
content management requires a systematic approach to added to delays in document deployment. Also, commonly no
classifying information. The classification framework, or one bothered to see if there were any similar documents
taxonomy, allows content owners to categorize their content already in the system, because it was too difficult to find them.
so that it becomes more useful to a broader audience.
Taxonomy allows knowledge seekers, whether they are The seemingly logical placement of content varied with each
researchers or the general public, to easily find and re-use functional unit. For example, some product lines organized by
information rather than recreating it. their business strategy, some by their functional sub-
organizations and one actually organized all their content by
Taxonomies are not new; in fact most work groups organize the geographical area that produced it. One had to actually
their information around a hierarchy that developed over know where content may have been produced or they would
several years. In most corporate environments, each product not have a chance of finding it!
line or functional group organizes its information from its
internal viewpoint rather than from a broader viewpoint. Use Search results returned too much content and there was not a
of a broader viewpoint would however, encourage knowledge simple way to focus results toward specific topics. Adding to
sharing beyond the product line or group. To be successful in the search problem, terminology varied among the functional
the digital world must eventually merge these independent groups.
hierarchies toward a common taxonomy.
A content management process was needed to ensure that
This paper details the development of an enterprise-wide valid content was displayed and an information management
taxonomy for a diverse, global oil and gas services company. solution was needed to deliver content about specific subjects
The paper describes how the taxonomy has been implemented, to people seeking the information.
including the application of taxonomy in a comprehensive
content management system, knowledge management A content management software system was deployed to
initiatives, and effective portal design. Challenges and lessons manage the content. This system allows content to be tagged
learned are also presented, the most significant of which are with attributes defining a content owner, author, review date
issues surrounding the means to get people to think differently and expiration date and tagged with taxonomy terms defining
and do things in different ways. the information contained in the document.
2 SPE 90006
considered a priority. SAP was deployed within the subject portal tool using taxonomy terms to search for the latest
company in 2000 and agreements about equipment purchased Health Safety and Environment (HSE) information. The
and equipment sold had created an enterprise hierarchy that system searches for documents using logical taxonomy rules.
led to the Tools & Components facet and the Oil, Gas, Clicking on Flash Alerts retrieves 12 documents that are less
Chemicals, & Lubricants facet. The SAP hierarchy for our than 30 days old categorized with the Alerts and HSE
organization also provided the terms for the Organization organization taxonomy terms.
facet.
that an information seeker is located in North America and taxonomy term and other often used terms. Thus the content
works for a particular product line then searches should owner spends their time classifying the document with the
prioritize retrieved information toward North America and the detail terms that differentiated it.
seeker’s product line.
The software systems used in Knowledge Management do not
As an example, the SAP organization hierarchy was an input automatically provide value without a process and a culture to
for the Organization facet. When one looks for information, share. Enterprise-wide change is called for and requires a clear
the system can pull the seekers organization from an identity plan. See Figure 4.
management database fed by SAP and establish a priority for
displaying information tagged with the particular
organization’s taxonomy term.
Figure 3: Personalization of displayed information Second, communicate constantly with the stake holders. They
need to know the overall process and how it will affect them
and their associates. They will be concerned about any change
to how they access and publish their information before and
Information providers can use taxonomy to focus their
after beneficial content management. A particular issue may
information toward key concepts (i.e. taxonomy terms)
be that they previously owned their particular hierarchy yet
understood by specific information seekers. New and revised
they now will share taxonomy with the enterprise. Classifying
information of interest for specific information seekers is
a document with a taxonomy term will allow that document to
automatically displayed in the information seekers portal.
be shared with everyone interested in that term.
Lessons Learned
In summary:
Conclusions
References:
1. Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium, POSC E&P
Cataloguing initiative, http://www.posc.org/, February 3,
2004.