Enterprise Social Bookmarking at MITRE

This presentation was an overview of the Onomi product development and deployment at MITRE.

The initial project goal was to understand the use of social bookmarking within and enterprise. Specific sub goals were on social bookmarkings ability to provide an environment for knowledge sharing, ability to feed expertise finding or user profiling, ability to form networks and to enhance the value of information retrieval.

Features of Onomi:

• Based on a open source product called Scuttle
  
• Similar interface to del.icio.us
  
• People create the bookmarks with a title, URL, description
  
• Bookmarks can be kept private
  
• RSS feeds are available
  
• It is integrated with e-mail subscription service
  
• Incorporates broken URL checking
  
• Incorporates a people network section
  
• Related tags
  
• Related users
  

Some interesting data points on the Onomi implementation:
-83% of the tags are from external web sites.
-86% of the tags are shared
-50% of the company uses the software
-23,676 bookmarks total in the system
-130,310 total tags
-16,371 unique tags

The search engine indexes all of the public bookmarks in the system and presents the bookmarks as search results. The result indicates which tags have been applied to the term. The integration is done via XML feeds. It is still not 100% complete, a separate capability to search only tags has not been created. They integrate the bookmarks and tags into a separate search ala OneBox on some of their different enterprise searches experiences. They are planning on leveraging the items that are bookmarked for relevancy improvements in a future release. The bookmark search results include a presence awareness to allow users to IM or call the author of the bookmark.

An interesting capability they have is around best bets. They enable anyone to identify a bookmark as a potential best bet. This automatically populates a database of potential best bets which is searched. Results of the search against this database are presented similar to our EY Professionals Recommend. It is different from our approach of specifically identifying promotions for key words.