You can count on Stephen Arnold to not pull punches. Everybody is talking about taxonomy as the ultimate solution to information retrieval. But do they appreciate how difficult it is to do well?
Arnold answers his question - "Why are taxonomies perceived as the silver bullet that will kill the vampire search or CMS system" - with five points that mainly show that people think taxonomies are a) a quick fix, and b) easy to create especially with the aid of software. Neither is true.
2 comments:
Taxonomies aren't a silver bullet, but they are a foundation. But, you want to keep your taxonomies very simple and very focused.
right now in the SharePoint space we are trying to sort all of this out! Please feel free to participate
www.sharepointplan.com
Mark Schneider
I find taxonomies in the web world face a problem of perception. Clients can't seem to let go of the idea of classifying down to every specific item/variance. Convincing them that doing so hurts rather than helps on a web site is a challenge. Seeing the behavior of a well-done taxonomy or controlled vocabulary on a web site can change that perception. And that's only the beginning. Autoclassification can work but you need such a large knowledge base that's chosen well that most sites can't fulfill those requirements. I'm working on a project now in which we're pulling articles for the KB as we manually tag to prepare for future feeds from partners.
Taxonomy isn't a silver bullet because it's not a quick fix. It takes time and strategic thought to get the content boiled down to core terms.
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