Shared Taxonomies

Verity's Walter Underwood pointed me to Verity's Collaborative Classifier (the classifier formerly known as Quiver). Walter says "VCC allows separate topic experts to manage parts of the hierarchy. They can look at newly-classified docs and set thresholds for where they want to individually approve them."[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Different SMEs editing the same taxonomy within pre-defined workflow and role constraints sounds pretty neat. Could even shoot some holes in my taxonomy-skeptical enterprise IA roadmap (46Kb PDF). Although I should add that VCC's approach seems to make sense in contexts with specialized domains that don't overlap much, and with few relevant facets to muddy things up further. Then again, the same could be said for any large taxonomy...

Any opinions on or experiences with shared taxonomies out there? Any of you ever tried Quiver/VCC?

For your further edification, here's a use case straight from Verity's promotional literature:

Use Case: Chemical Engineers Collaborating with Knowledge Engineers

Peppy Plastics is the leading manufacturer of plastic toys in the world, with factories on each continent. Mack, a manufacturing engineer in the Chicago office, has been assigned the editor of the entire Manufacturing branch of Peppy’s corporate taxonomy. Shortly after, Peppy gets its ISO 9001 certification. To accommodate this, Mack creates a subcategory called ISO Procedures directly below the Manufacturing category. He then places a dozen ISO procedure documents in the subcategory, and uses Verity Collaborative Classifier’s interface to control Verity K2 Enterprise’s automatic classification features and create the rules that define the subcategory based on those documents.

Verity Collaborative Classifier automatically routes the new subcategory to Sue, a knowledge engineer in Peppy’s London office who has been assigned the role of Managing Editor for the Manufacturing, Marketing and Sales branches of the taxonomy. Sue notes that there is already a subcategory called Procedures under Manufacturing, and rejects the modification but suggests that the ISO Procedures subcategory should fall under Procedures. Mack resubmits the ISO Procedures subcategory under the Procedures subcategory, and Collaborative Classifier again routes the new subcategory to Sue. This time Sue approves the new subcategory, Collaborative Classifier immediately publishes the change, Verity K2 populates the subcategory according to its business rules, and end-users across the enterprise are able to browse it for ISO procedures just minutes after Mack created it.

Related...

[Bloug]