Expert scoffs at Autonomy software

At Genentech headquarters today in South San Francisco, there was a seminar on "Metadata & Controlled Vocabularies: What Are they and What is their Value?" given by Amy Warner, faculty member in Information Architecture at UMichigan, Genentech's consultant on taxonomy creation and a well-known corporate consultant on information technology. Dr. Warner had a final slide with "Autonomy"and "Semio" written on it, and here's what she said:

 "I always get asked, aren't there automated tools to build taxonomies? There is some 'Hiearchy Generation Software' available, but it generally relies on the principal of Collocation, not aboutness, which is preferable. Collocation simply means statistical clustering. Two examples are Autonomy and Semio. Beware of these. They don't work very well. They make many promises, but Collocation only works some of the time. I shouldn't bash, but I haven't talked to a company yet that likes Autonomy, including those that have bought it. In many cases they are overselling their product."

Any reaction? Received on Thu Aug 23 2001 - 23:38:57 CDT