Talking to people about information

Part 2: How Do THEY Use Information? Investigating the user information process , Scott Brown, FUMSI (Julu 2010)

This article is not about taxonomies, but people who organize information for others will appreciate this first hand account by Scott Brown on finding out how people get and use information.

His questions: "what DO you do with the information; how does it fit into your overall information process; what value do you get from using the library services?"


From the preface:

"In the second part of Scott Brown's real life case studies on using, reusing, and repurposing information we move into the real Bermuda Triangle. Where exactly does the information go that we, as professionals, provide for our clients/users? What 'use' do they make of it? We all need to show value in the services we provide with tangibility and outcomes being important. Scott also points out that we need to think more about how 'savvy' our users may already be and get ready to partner with them more as it could lead to better outcomes all around."

Ontology Editor

Need an Ontology Editor? by Stephen Arnold (June 23)


Protégé is open source software for managing word lists and ontologies develooped at Stanford’s Center for for Biomedical Informatics Research.

Facets for Taxonomies

From Sumo to Samurai: getting your taxonomies fighting fit: Part 1 by Kate Simpson, FUMSI (June 2010)

This FUMSI article follows up on a 2-part piece last year on Designing User-Centred Taxonomies. Kate Simpson takes issue with what she calls Sumo taxonomies (blockbuster big), and proposes more use of facets and faceted search.

"Part 1 of this article - yes, if it's about taxonomies it just seems to need two parts - introduces the concept of facets and the power of faceted navigation and search. A later article will aim to train any of those lumbering Sumo-type taxonomy trees you may have into the fighting-fit warriors of Samurai facets."

Classification systems as we have known them were designed for paper. Facets work better for digital.

SLA 2010 - Taxonomy stream

People working with taxonomies will want to attend sessions at the SLA 2010 Conference organized by the Taxonomy Division.

From the announcement:

Patrick Lambe asks for your input to a survey on the nature of taxonomy work, he is doing. Please take a look at it at http://tinyurl.com/taxonomywork
Patrick is speaking several times for the Taxonomy Division, often cosponsored with the Knowledge management Division, at the Annual Meeting. The talks include; Presenting a Business Case for Taxonomies, The Future of Knowledge Managers, Taxonomies and Knowledge Management. He is the author of "Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness"

Heather Hedden is presenting Taxonomy Made Easy: an Introduction to Taxonomies for the Accidental Taxonomist, June 16. Fitting title as she is the author of a new book "The Accidental Taxonomist" . She will be signing copies of it at the meeting. Published by Information Today Inc., the book has come out just in time for sale at the SLA 2010 Annual Conference. Copies will be available at both the ITI exhibit booth and at the SLA Marketplace area in the conference exhibit hall throughout the duration of the INFO-EXPO. Heather Hedden will be signing copies of her book at the SLA Marketplace during part of the INFO-EXPO "French Quarter" Networking Reception in the exhibits hall. Book details are available at http://www.accidental-taxonomist.com

Marjorie Hlava and Alice Redmond Neal, who have worked with over 200 controlled vocabularies in their careers, are presenting an all day workshop on saturday to provide an introduction or refresher on taxonomies and then an afternoon of implementation strategies from search to portal. Catch up and then expand your knowledge at this session.

Full program is given at the Taxonomy Division wiki - Taxonomy-related Programs & Events

Using Taxonomies in Sharepoint - Do the groundwork

SharePoint Taxonomy Fairy Dust, Stephen E Arnold, Beyond Search (April 21)

Stephen Arnold examines the claims made in SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Controlled Vocabulary for Content Enrichment by Jeff Carr (one of a series in CMSWire on Taxonomy and Metadata for Sharepoint). Article has screenshots and how-to-use - making it all seem very simple. But Stephen Arnold reminds us that the taxonomy does not miraculously show itself. It requires analysis, understanding of the business and of the users: it's not just a selection from a dropdown menu.

Arnold: "My suggestion is to do some thinking about the nature of the user, the specific information retrieval needs, and the expertise required to do the job to avoid wasting time and money."

Peter Morville on Search

Peter Morville, co-author of Search Patterns, answers questions in this interview - Customer Behaviour and Business Insights at Bridgeline Digital.

+ Value of faceted search - more of a discovery process
+ Difference between faceted navigation and parametric search
+ Inherent problems in semantic search - we need context to understand meaning

"In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or "ontologies") that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don't scale, and they can't keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge."

+ Using search analytics to improve navigation - " Also, for sites like Etsy.com that combine taxonomy with folksonomy, there's a wonderful opportunity to create a feedback loop. Popular tags should be considered for integration into the taxonomy, to help users navigating within the site and to improve SEO."

Classify your content

Classification Schemes (When and how to use them) by Donna Spencer, UX Booth (Apr 27, 2010)

Very readable and well illustrated article on simple classification schemes to use to organize content.

Enterprise Search Direction 2010

Search-based applications support critical decision-making, Enterprise Search (Apr 28)

Data from IDC on the enterprise search market and an overview of technology trends. Although there are several leading companies (Autonomy, Microsoft, Google and Endeca), smaller companies make up 60% of the market.

"Search technology has evolved over the past decade, moving from basic keyword search to more sophisticated enterprise search that includes relevancy ranking, concept searching, clustering and entity extraction. More recently, the emergence of search-based applications has brought a new dimension to search (see chart http://www.kmworld.com/downloads/66062/Search_Market_Map_Chart.pdf). "These applications also employ search as a central component, but they solve a specific business problem or support an information-intensive process," says Feldman, "Search-based applications as a group are growing much faster than enterprise search because their value in accomplishing a task is immediately recognized by business users, because they are quick to deploy, and because they either control costs or increase revenue. Good examples of those are call center support, e-discovery, marketing, sales, R&D research to locate opportunities and e-commerce.""

Intralinks, Endeca, and Metacarta receive a more extended description.

Search Patterns' excerpt on faceted navigation is online

Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender wrote in their book, Search Patterns, that
"Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade."

We see it mainly in e-commerce, but it can help in many other situations.

Chapter 4 of the book is available at AListApart - Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

"Faceted navigation addresses the universal need to narrow. Consequently, this pattern has become nearly ubiquitous in e-commerce, given the availability of structured metadata and the clear business value of improving product findability. Faceted navigation is being deployed rapidly across an impressively wide variety of contexts and platforms. In the world of search, faceted navigation is everywhere. "

Taxonomy Tools

Tools for Managing Taxonomies (or Thesauri, or Ontologies) by Heather Hedden, Earley and Associates (March 5)

Good overview of current tools for developing and maintaining a taxonomy - talks about requirements and names tools.

"There is a need for tools that do more than merely enabling manual adding and deleting of terms. Mapping two taxonomies is something that only a few tools support, but there are many other day-to-day taxonomy management activities that also require specialized taxonomy management software."