Keeping up with Information Design

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design is an excellent weblog and resource for news and information done by Peter J. Bogaards. Peter Morville, president of Semantic Studio, says in his testimonial on the site that he uses it everyday. Major categories include information design, information architecture, user experience, and metadata. There is not a category for taxonomies but a search will bring up several entries posted to other categories.

Taxonomy vs Folksonomy

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags from Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet (2005)

Clay Shirky has written an excellent review of formal categorization versus user categorization. It is based on two talks he gave, one about ontologies and the other on folksonomies and tags. He identifies many failings in the traditional classification schemes and especially takes Yahoo to task for its categorization. Classification systems tend to be biased, he argues, and be rigid. User tagging, on the other hand, is more democratic and self-regulating. The article is something of a polemic in defense of user tagging. We may not agree with all the points but it makes us appreciate the weaknesses of classification schemes and some of the potential of user tagging.

As it happens, I found this article by searching for taxonomy at Keotag, the new all-in-one meta search for locating tagged items, and selecting Blinklist as the target source. There is something to be said for this style of serach.

Taxonomies at CiL2006

A Tale of Two Taxonomies , Information Today blog (March 24, 2006)

Taxonomies were on the program at the Computers in Libraries Conference 2006. Jennifer Evert, Taxonomy Product Manager at LexisNexis and Marjorie Hlava, President of Access Innovations presented their views on the importance of taxonomies and indexing.

Intellosophic Taxonomies

New intelligence for Documentum CIS, KMWorld (Mar 13, 2006)

"Intellisophic reports it has integrated its pre-built taxonomies with EMC Documentum Content Intelligence Services (CIS). The move gives Documentum CIS customers access to Intellisophic taxonomies covering a variety of specific industries including: automotive, chemicals, defense, energy, finance, high-tech, information sciences, legal, life sciences, military and others."

Healthline's Taxonomy

People interested in examples of taxonomies may find the health taxonomy developed by Healthline useful. A recent press release described the work of Healthline.

"To present this information in medically accurate context, Healthline has developed the largest consumer health taxonomy of its kind, featuring an information classification system that delivers precise, relevant open Web results, related physician-reviewed articles and HealthMaps® – Healthline's unique visual navigation tools – to optimize the search experience for individuals seeking healthcare information."

From the press release - Info.com Adds Health Vertical Search to its Search Platform (Feb 28, 2006)

Enterprise Search Mix

The Perfect Search By Penny Crosman, Intelligent Enterprise Magazine (March 1, 2006)

Article surveys the enterprise-search tools available to companies and identifies key technology developers and vendors.

Google-style search engines are not suitable for some situations. "Where many repositories of non-Web content and documents need to be searched or critical information must be found quickly, companies need to design searches that approximate human reasoning."

Key components to improved enterprise search will be tools for structuring content - now easier with XML tools; building taxonomies - or possibly using light-weight approach of user tagging, or clustering tools; and analyzing text to extract names (entities) or concepts. IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture is being adopted by many vendors as a "backbone" for these approaches.

Companies where this is most needed may include e-commerce sites, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, and call centers.

"The sophisticated search pioneers are e-commerce sites, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, which have the most to gain: greater sales, faster drug development, detection of terrorist activity. Call centers are getting search makeovers so that multiple search tools can mine unstructured content and databases together and give reps all the information they need to close calls."

Folksonomies - stay openminded

Pros and cons of tagging are examined in Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?, a new article in DLib (January 2006) by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin, two writers from UKOLN, the UK centre for digital information management.

From the abstract: "In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular."

Makes the point that folksonomies that we know at the popular sites such as del.icio.us and flickr are trying to serve two worlds - the individual and the collective. This may affect quality but the authors ask people to be patient - in time the folksonomy will reflect some consensus and evolve with changes in language.

ERIC Thesaurus

The thesaurus used by the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is another excellent resource that can be viewed online. ERIC updates this quarterly. Browse or search for terms.

Learn from MeSH

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has created an educational video to help people understand and use the MeSH vocabulary in searching Medline and PubMed.

Branching Out: The MeSH® Vocabulary describes the structure and content of the Medical Subject Heading thesaurus, shows how indexers use it to index documents, and instructs searchers on how to utilize it to find documents and understand the topic.

This is an excellent introduction to the nature of controlled vocabulary and its value in enabling information retrieval.

Constructing a Subject Gateway

For the technically inclined, this article on Constructing Web subject gateways using Dublin Core, RDF and Topic Maps offers some guidance on the technical database aspects of building a taxonomy.

In this research project, the authors built a software tool that would make it easier to build a subject gateway, essentially a taxonomy for subject access, and using the metadata definitions of Dublin Core. The article described the relational database structure.

Constructing Web subject gateways using Dublin Core, RDF and Topic Maps by Jesús Tramullas, Department of Librarianship and Information Sciences, and
Piedad Garrido, Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering
Zaragoza University, Zaragoza, Spain; Information Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, January 2006

http://informationr.net/ir/11-2/paper248.html