KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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Boosting Enterprise Search with Beer Metadata
by Flyn L. Flesher of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C.
Boosting Enterprise Search
with Better Metadata
Maintaining complete, accurate, up-to-date metadata can be
beneficial, and sometimes necessary, to finding the right information
at the right time. Unfortunately, gathering accurate metadata can be as
difficult as it is worthwhile.
Metadata is any data about other data. The three groups of
metadata most relevant to law firms are data about a firm's documents
(such as the document's author, created and last modified dates,
and file type), employees (such as title, location and date hired) and
maers or projects (such as client, dates opened and closed, and maer
type). These three groups of metadata oen overlap and can benefit
enterprise search. It's time to give your enterprise search a boost with
beer metadata.
Benefiting from Metadata
Enterprise search has changed and improved considerably the practice
of law and legal knowledge management (KM). Before enterprise
search, legal professionals relied heavily on their colleagues to help
locate relevant information.
To find past work product, they needed to hunt through oen
complex folder structures in a document server or KM repository,
hoping that their colleagues had appropriately named and filed the
needed materials. The best options for identifying internal subject
maer experts was knocking on doors or sending an all-aorney email
in the hope that someone would respond.
To identify past maers the firm handled involving a specific area
of law or industry, one could only hope that colleagues meaningfully
described their maers at file opening (and that the information was
searchable).
