More on Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet

Recently, I gave a presentation on tagging to the Taxonomy Community of Practice. I was joined by two speakers, including Jim Smallwood of Mitre. Jim is part of the Onomi team and provided a very useful description of Onomi and its development. I twrote about Onomi before but here is more detail. Mitre did a pilot for this social bookmarking system for six months. It was built for people working on real projects. The created a core group of individuals who set the foundation for creating tags. These core people will keep the system robust. A larger group uses the system but does not add to it. Use it to see what is new and locate experts.

There is already a lot of information sharing at Mitre including Sharepoint based discussion groups. Tagging was to supplement this existing sharing in many forms. Hoped to build more communities around common interests. At the same time a podcasting effort – Mitrecast was underway. The podcast people contacted them to share tags. Also an internal RSS aggregator linked to them. They want to leverage the folkonomy created with Onomi to update the corporate taxonomy. Mitre is still exploring these issues.

The Mitre team took an exiting open source application, Scuttle. It was chosen for ease of use, extensibility, and existing feature set. They went to core users to get what features to add. Moved it form Sequel to oracle and implemented single sign-on. Help to recognize people and use LDAP. They added ability to easily email bookmarks to people.. provide default email text to add context to tag. They added ability to browse bookmakrs by users, or by corporate affiliation. RSS was also added.

You can provide a title for each bookmark and 250 characters to describe it and add tags. You can see other resources with this tag are listed and number of users who have bookmarked it. You can search by tags and by the words in the description field. You can add additional tags to your search to narrow the results.

The average tagger has about 35 bookmarks and uses 3 to 4 tags for each item on average. They have promoted it in several ways. The posting of banner ads on the corporate intranet have led to immediate increased use. They also held meetings to promote the system. They posted use cases for the system to give others ideas and motivate them to use it. enterprise tagging enterprise social media