I've been meaning to respond to Daniela's post about the Semantic Technology Conference and find, appallingly, that almost a month has gone by!

In it she writes

The funny thing is that i had seen Christine present at other conferences while she was at Intuit and i admit i kinda hounded her when she was at Intuit because i wanted to tell her what Factiva (now we are Dow Jones) was doing in the space- the message after she joined us i got was that Factiva and especially the Synaptica and Taxonomy business was not doing a very good job of telling the marketplace what are core capabilities were (perhaps however she was just being nice and i just couldn't sell it ;-0 ...all kidding aside I am aware that we still have a lot of work to do but if anyone knows me that is reading this i am always up for cheer leading for a winning team- and i think i got one of those now.

No, Daniela, it's not that you can't sell it. It's that those who came before you were so BAD at selling it, I found I needed to tune out for a while. It's a typical life dilemma - when you know you can do something for yourself, are you willing to pay a premium price to have someone else do it? If you can sew, are you going to pay hundreds of dollars for one piece of clothing? If you like to garden, are you going to pay extra (in dollars and carbon) to buy organic?

Determining and selling the value of vocabularies, taxonomies, metadata etc is very hard; in fact another colleague of ours, Marti Heyman, recently gave an excellent presentation on the subject. (Hopefully the video will be up soon!) Joe Busch and Ron Daniel of Taxonomy Strategies have some excellent, easy to understand presentations on the subject too. But, even after you've determined a willingness to pay, integrate and maintain, how do you find vocabularies you trust? How do you ensure timeliness or interoperability for at least several years?

Ok, I've gone off topic. Finding answer to those questions is the best part of what our team does at Dow Jones. Daniela, you are GREAT at your job, we have a fantastic team, and I'm really very honored to be part of it. Great things are ahead!