On July 14, 2022, Semantic Web Company (SWC), WAND, and Tridion teams convened to discuss and understand how Pool Party (SWC product) taxonomies can kick start semantic AI projects in Tridion Sites and Tridion Docs. And also discuss the expert-curated taxonomies that WAND provides and can be leveraged by Tridion customers.

Florian Bauer, CSO (chief solutions officer) at SWC and Ross Leher CEO at WAND led the presentation. Please note, Pool Party and WAND come as a part of the Tridion Docs and Tridion Sites products.

Florian started the presentation by stating the need for Tridion building semantic AI. He explained that customers and users need relevant and accurate information, meaningful communication, instant access, and consistent experiences. And data is of course the starting point, we need to have it in the right format and structure to work.

Tridion semantic AI was built and includes auto smart tagging to provide structure to the data and on the other hand semantic search for users (customers, employees, and other stakeholders) to go in and find the most relevant information from across the enterprise, even if the nomenclature is different.

Florian mentioned that a lot of SWC’s customers came back to understand the amount of time it would take to build taxonomies and ultimately start using semantic AI. Taxonomies is of course the first and time-intensive process that is needed for smart tagging and hence for semantic search to work. With the goal to expedite the taxonomies process, SWC partnered with WAND, which provides an exhaustive list of expert-curated taxonomies that spans across 35 industry verticals and each and every function of the enterprise (core, IT, finance, marketing, HR, project management, fleet management, etc.).

How WAND’s expert-curated taxonomies save significant time?

Ross Leher from WAND explained the way in which these expert-curated taxonomies can be imported into Pool Party and hence Tridion. He mentioned that WAND’s taxonomies are vast and exhaustive because they have been built since 1983. Starting with insurance companies, the scope was expanded to include the 35 verticals that it covers today.

WAND’s taxonomies repositories help clients to accelerate the sales cycle by 6-12 months, expedite client purchase decisions, create effective demonstrations for clients, and enable quick deployment. WAND’s taxonomies are selected and delivered online and are formatted for direct import into enterprise applications. The whole set-up is completed in a matter of a few minutes.

Importing taxonomies from WAND requires only two steps to import the taxonomies into the workflow and incorporate them into the Tridion architecture. It has the foundation metadata module to inform the AI of the curated structure that the AI engine could refer to. Usually, it takes 6-10 weeks to create a metadata model or a given domain of knowledge. With WAND’s curated taxonomies this time was reduced to 7 to 10 days. Thus, speeding up the semantic AI implementation significantly.

How to use WAND’s simple user interface to download taxonomies?

Ross demonstrated the way to browse, find, select, and download the relevant taxonomies to a particular part or the entire organization. WAND’s taxonomies for different verticals are categorized bucketed into libraries. The user can browse through the libraries to find the relevant vertical. Each vertical has a suite of taxonomies to address each domain of the vertical.

 Below is a view of the BFSI vertical that shows various domains covered within the financial taxonomies suite. 

The user can then click on any domain and browse the various taxonomy terms, e.g. for BFSI vertical the taxonomy terms are bucketed into banking channels, banking documents, banking IT, banking metrics, ESG governance, payment processing, risk management, etc. For the banking vertical itself, WAND has 1,795 taxonomy terms, bucketed under these various banking functions!   

These are the terms that Pool Party will use to automatically tag documents and pages. All the user needs to do is select the relevant bucket/file and click on deliver to download the taxonomy terms and then choose whether it should be downloaded across the enterprise or a selected organization/branch only. Then the user needs to select PoolParty application as the target application and the download begins to the chosen file destination or desktop.

Ross browsed through some of the verticals such as environment and workplace and safety verticals to show the depth to which the taxonomies cover some of the latest and hottest topics covered in the library. Ross also took us through WAND’s website, where the user can easily browse the various vertical suites.

How to bring WAND’s taxonomies into Tridion to perform automated smart tagging?

Florian took us through a demonstration, which included insurance content that needed to be automatically smart-tagged using WAND’s taxonomies. Florian used Tridion 1 demo for the same. Florian went to the WAND’s webpage and chose insurance taxonomy and chose the high-level “insurance” taxonomy bucket and also the “legal” domain file for download so that he could demonstrate both options.

Florian went to the downloaded ‘Zip’ files and extracted those to the chosen file destination. Then he imported these files using Pool Party’s RDF import option into the relevant Pool Party projects that he had created. While importing he selected ‘run data validation’ option in the import prompt box that Pool Party displayed. The validation option runs checks on imported taxonomies to check if there are any issues with the taxonomies imported and if any then potentially fix it. 

The file is then imported and validation checks are run, Florian imported the ‘Legal’ taxonomy file and the validation engine didn’t find any issue. Hence, Florian went ahead and saved the taxonomy. The whole process was completed within 3 minutes. Similarly, Florian went ahead and imported the high-level ‘Insurance’ taxonomy and that also went through seamlessly without any issues detected in the validation process.

Florian then demonstrated the way to use these taxonomies in Tridion Docs for smart tagging using the same Insurance example. He took us through one of the relevant documents in the Tridion Docs system. The tagging shows up in the properties tab, where we could find the high-level “insurance” and the “legal” buckets that Florian had connected. From there, Florian clicked on ‘suggest tags’ option, which automatically performed smart tagging throughout the document as displayed below:

How to amend taxonomies in Tridion?

Florian demonstrated how users can combine WAND’s list of taxonomies with those that experts or users in a client organization would like to add. He chose the age limit part of the insurance document that speaks about the age limit of the liability and hence needs ‘age limit’ to be included in the taxonomy term. Florian looked up the list of taxonomies and found that there already exists a “limitation of liability” taxonomy, but that wasn’t picked up by auto-tagging because it potentially didn’t view it as a limitation of liability.

To enable the taxonomy to include the age limit, Florian added ‘age limit’ as an alternate label in the limitation liability taxonomy and saved it. Then it refreshed the extraction model of Pool Party, which would in the next cycle automatically pick the age limit as a smart tag. He demonstrated the same and it worked as the smart tag ‘limitation of liability’ was added. 

Benefits of the bundled Tridion, Pool Party and WAND offering

Florian thus concluded that clients from any vertical can get started with tagging in a matter of a few minutes with WAND. Ross was timing the whole exercise and mentioned that it was complete in 14 minutes, including the amendment of taxonomy to add a new label. Florian mentioned that Pool Party offers complete flexibility where users can add/amend terms, alternate labels, concepts, synonyms, and definitions.  

Flroian summarized the benefits of using the technology bundle of Tridion, Pool Party, and Wand:

1. Reduces risk of innovation: Ready-to-use taxonomies and proven technology reduce the chances of a project falling short of expectations
2. Flexible in scope and securing quality: Taxonomies can be amended as needed
3. Optimize project cost: With high-quality data, decades of experience, and efficient enterprise software customers derive the best return on investment
4. Go live in a predictable timeframe: Starting with WAND taxonomies can significantly reduce bootstrapping time
5. Foundation for enterprise knowledge graph: Pool Party and WAND combined helps clients build their enterprise-wide knowledge graphs at their own pace and consequently build applications
6. A good working basis for taxonomists and professionals: WAND delivers a strong base of taxonomy and Pool Party then helps extend these with specific elements in a targeted way