Raytheon an early adapter in tagging behind the corporate fire-wall

David Weinberger mentioned about the discussion on taxocop about social tagging in corporation on Friday and now Steve Boyd and Alex Barnett picked this up.

Here is how Chrisine Connors from Raytheon is implementing a hybrid model withing the entreprise:

"Raytheon, successfully uses social tagging in a hybrid approach. At Raytheon, people submit website suggestions (URLs) along with recommended tags/keyword which are subsequently verified and approved by librarians.
"We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission."

She explained more about their approach:
"In search, we insert Suggested Sites in a "feature" box to the right of the regularly ranked results. We do not allow these suggestions to affect the ranking determined by the algorithm. Our surveys show that the sites submitted via this process repeatedly rank as the result deemed "best" for the user's query. It is the single best thing we've done. I can't tell you how much we've spent on formal taxonomies, but suffice it to say that it's enough for me to wonder why I haven't gone into business for myself!"

We should not forget also IBM's experiment with Dogear