Taxonomies as underpinning for sophisticated tools

In attending the SLA 2005 conference, held in Toronto in June, I was impressed with how prominent taxonomies had become as a feature of many of the products being demonstrated in the Exhibit Hall. This became material for this article - The Future of Search: Observations from SLA 2005 Conference - published in the SLA Toronto Chapter Courier (Summer 2005)

From the introduction: "One thing was clear from the many content aggregators at the SLA Conference 2005, the interfaces are beautiful to look at, taxonomies and metadata are the underpinning for all sophisticated tools, and clustering is being adopted as a search aid. All of that is happening for the specialized information products. On the Web it’s a different matter, at least judging from Google. There could be a battle building between the sophistication of specialty tools and the simplicity, sometimes deceiving, of Google."