To meta-tag or not to meta-tag was the key topic in a panel discussion dealing with enterprise search and how best to create intranets, held at London’s Online Information and Information Management Solutions show. The gathered experts, including taxonomy specialists, usability experts, and search solutions creators, said that the best intranets employ a mix of search techniques.

Independent consultant Stella Dextre Clarke said, “Typically it is very hard to find information on an intranet.” She recommended that when firms are creating an intranet they should consider all their options. “When clients ask me to create a taxonomy for them, I say that I will, but with a health warning: ‘It will not solve all of your problems’.”

Amelia Kassel, president of research firm MarketingBase, agreed with this multi-fronted approach. “If you have complex information needs you need metadata, you need taxonomies and you need controlled vocabulary terms, otherwise you won’t find what you are looking for.”

But firms should not rush into tagging their documents, as others warned that relying on unskilled workers to add tags to documents could cause more problems that it solves.

Stephen Arnold, president of enterprise search specialist Arnold Information Technologies, said: “We have moved to social tagging within the workplace, with unskilled workers being left to add their own meta-tags.” He added that such an approach would make finding relevant information difficult.

James Robertson, managing director of data management consultancy Step Two Designs, said, “We need to make search as effective as we can. I am a great believer in taxonomies but they can take years’ worth of man hours to create. If you don’t have one now, what can you do?” In the absence of such tagging Robertson disagreed with Arnold and said that firms should use their unskilled staff to tag documents, because then the organisation would at least get “best bets” – search results that are close to those requested, and would allow for further drilling down.

Francois Bourdoncle, chief executive at search specialist Exalead, said that no document should be created without the use of some tagging. “You can not do without metadata. We use machine classification, then we combine it with metadata. We have to combine our approaches.”