As an overview of NetWeaver Knowledge Management on its website, SAP notes that:
"With the Knowledge Management functional unit, SAP NetWeaver provides a central, role-specific point of entry to unstructured information from various data sources. This unstructured information can exist in different formats such as text documents, presentations, or HTML files. Workers in an organization can access information from different source such as file servers, their intranet, or the World Wide Web. A generic framework integrates these data sources and provides access to the information contained in them through the portal.
The Knowledge Management functional unit supports you in structuring information and making it available to the correct target audience. You can use the different functions on all content of integrated data sources, as long as the technical conditions are met."
So, this provides us a framework for this application. Now, how is taxonomy used? In SAP NetWeaver Knowledge Management, taxonomy is used to classify documents. Then, the documents can be browsed via the centralized taxonomy regardless of where the documents are actually stored.
Again from SAP:
"A taxonomy is a hierarchical structure of categories in which you classify documents according to content, organizational, or other criteria. Documents that are stored in different repositories can be included in the same category. Taxonomies portal users to navigate in a uniform structure throughout an organization even if information is stored in heterogeneous storage locations.
After the initial configuration has taken place, the system automatically classifies new and changed documents."
SAP Help Portal goes into depth on how taxonomy is used and the taxonomy features of SAP NetWeaver Knowledge Management:
http://bit.ly/1MHxTu9
SAP NetWeaver Taxonomy Based Document Classification
SAP also has a document classification capability which can be done via a Query-based Classification or via an Example-based Classification.
Query-based classification operates by assigning a search query to each taxonomy category. Then, documents are assigned to the taxonomy categories based upon the query. This is essentially a rules based approach.
Example-based classification operates by assigning exemplar documents to each taxonomy category. This is a training set based approach.
More details between the two approaches from SAP are at http://bit.ly/1PxZ3Z0
How to get started with Taxonomy in SAP NetWeaver
Taxonomies from the WAND Taxonomy Library Portal can easily be imported directly through the SAP NetWeaver Taxonomy import capability: http://bit.ly/1TqjTKD
This is a great way to jump start an SAP NetWeaver taxonomy initiative with highly relevant pre-built industry and business function taxonomies that can be customized specifically for your business.
