How to create cross-reference terms (using taxonomy) ?

[Jules Perrelet]

Good evening,

I'm hired as a Knowledge Manager for a big company. I plan to create a knowledge base with Confluence, in order to help the almost 15'000 employees with their IT issues.

Because not everyone here is speaking the "IT language", I want to make sure that people will find the proper solution, no matter what words they are using.

For exemple, if someone wants to find out "how to setup a printer", he or she might find out the tutorial called "how to setup a printer" by using multiple queries, like :

- how to add a printer

- how to setup a printer

- how to add an LRG

These 3 queries must link to the "how to setup a printer" title. For each articles, I'll need to create a kind of taxonomy like in the example. There will be thousands and thousands of articles, and I need users to find very quickly answers to their problems.

I'd like to know if there is some way to do it, the same way we can do it using Joomla with the custom fields !

Thank you !

Jules

[Eugene Morozov]

I realize this is an old post, but I'll try again anyway as there are no answers, and the question touches on a couple of related topics in knowledge management.

You are looking at two things here - faceted classification and alternative terms for the same concept. In your example, you have two facets: lifecycle (install, uninstall, etc.) and the type of equipment (printer, scanner, etc.). Each concept may have alternative terms ("install" may have a synonym of "add", "setup", etc.) and a hierarchy (printer may be of a specific brand, model, etc.).

Doing faceted classification and alternative terms is tricky with Confluence labels, especially if you have a lot of concepts (think thousands of products with specific names and product codes). Still, it is relatively easy to do in a Knowledge Organization System such as taxonomy that you can then integrate with Confluence. In your example, you may have a lifecycle taxonomy with a concept for installation (that has the preferred label of "install" and alternative labels of "add" and "setup") and an equipment taxonomy with a concept for the Brother HL-L2350DW printer (one concept with the preferred label of "HL-L2350DW" that has the broader concept with the preferred label of "Brother" that in turn has the broader concept with the preferred label of "Printer"). You would then tag your Confluence page with both of these concepts and let the user find the page using either preferred or alternative labels.

There is a range of products that would let you do that.

Integrated. Using a product like Synaptica Graphite to build and maintain the taxonomy and their Confluence add-on to link pages to concepts.

Granular. Using another commercial product like Graphologi, PoolParty or TopBraid, an open-source one like VocBench or even plain text editor or a piece of code to build SKOS taxonomy. Then using Taxonomies for Confluence add-on that we develop to integrate the taxonomy and use its concepts to tag individual Confluence pages.