Help:Tutorial

Demonstration

Check out Centiare's Demonstration area to see a collection of pages that highlight Centiare's Directory listing and search-result capabilities.

Nuts & Bolts

Semantic Tagging

When you're ready to create your own Directory listing on Centiare, there are two key elements that you should remember -- 90% of future user searches within Centiare will likely contain either:

• NAICS code

...and/or...

• ZIP code

If you or your business don't appropriately tag these elements in your Directory space, you're going to be missing from all of those search opportunities. You should certainly know your ZIP code, and better still if you know the ZIP+4. If you are unsure of the appropriate NAICS code (or codes) to use, the official U.S. Census site for NAICS is an appropriate reference.

Style Guidelines

Use the official NAICS names

When you indicate the industry in which you work, it will be most helpful to future semantic searches if you use the official NAICS name for your industry. For example, the NAICS code of 11199 indicates "Peanut Farming".

You may like to call your line of work "Goober Growing", but if you choose that name within Centiare, you're just cutting yourself off from the many, many more people who will be looking specifically for the term "Peanut Farming", because they will also be encouraged to enter official NAICS names when searching.

Use uniform titles when identifying any Key_Person

Within Centiare, one of the most useful features is the semantic tag, which allows for robust searching of the entire database. To allow the greatest number of users the greatest chance of successfully finding the records they want, it is helpful to agree on a certain uniformity when naming semantic tags and attributes.

For example, within the '''{{Infobox_Company}}''' template, you will see the following wonderful semantic tags:

Key_Person1_Title

Key_Person2_Title

Key_Person3_Title

...etc.

Ideally and if possible, any senior corporate employee should be accorded only one common title in Centiare, to optimize semantic searching. The more that users adhere to this guideline, the more likely their data will be found by people using Centiare's semantic search utility. Furthermore, if in doubt about Centiare's "preferred" rank and nomenclature of titles, the following list should be used to force consensus across the many differences that appear in the corporate working world. Within Centiare, please use only the following labels when naming Key Person titles:

• Chair (as opposed to Chairperson, Chairman, Chairwoman, etc.)
• Board (use for any non-Chair members of a Board of Directors)
• CEO (as opposed to Chief Executive Officer, Executive Director, President, Owner, etc.)
• CFO (as opposed to Chief Financial Officer, Controller, etc.)
• COO (as opposed to Chief Operations Officer, Senior Operations Manager, etc.)
• CIO (as opposed to Chief Information Officer, Senior Technologist, MIS Director, etc.)
• CMO (as opposed to Chief Marketing Officer, Communications Director, Director of Public Affairs, etc.)
• SVP (as opposed to Senior Vice President, Executive Vice President, Regional Director, Division Head, etc.)
• VP (as opposed to Vice President, Senior Manager, etc.)
• Manager (use as a catch-all for any middle management titles)
• Legal (as opposed to Attorney, Corporate Counsel, General Counsel, etc.)

Additionally, consider whether the Founder of an organization is also the CEO or Chair (in which case use the CEO or Chair nomenclature), or whether he or she has been relegated to some non-executive role such as "Spokesperson", "Advisor", or some other honorary title (in which case, do not include this person as a Key Person in the Infobox; rather, notate them in the Founder field and feel free to write about them in the article space).

Adherence to this Style Guideline should by no means be considered mandatory, nor a perjorative assessment of any person's "actual" title at their company. It is merely a mechanism to make semantic searching more productive for more Centiare users. If only three companies in the United States choose to call their CIO the Data Ninja, that's very cute, but not at all useful to Centiare users who are looking for CIO types of personnel in the state of Michigan.

(Note: any additions to the list above should first reach consensus on this entry's Discussion page.)

Dates

While the overall organization of Centiare is flat, certain sections do conform to traditional hierarchical structures; dates are one such area. Centiare takes advantage of MediaWiki's built-in subpage cross-referencing feature to facilitate hierarchical organization.

Organization

Years and months have their own Main page articles - for example 2005 and December.

For annual archival purposes, months are treated as subpages within the respective years in which they occur, and days are treated as subpages within the respective years/months in which they occur - for example, July 20, 2005.

For non-annual archival purposes, days are treated as subpages within the respective months in which they occur - for example, December 20.

The rationale for this organization is two-fold:

• References to year-month-day are useful for such items as a historical events, newspaper article publishing dates, etc.

• References to month-day are useful for such items as almanac listings without regard to the actual years in which they occur e.g. all births of famous actors which occurred on July 5, all deaths of notable statesmen which occurred on August 10, etc.