Taxonomy Boot Camp 2009

Taxonomy Boot Camp is coming up - November 19 - 20 - in San Jose, Ca.

Keynote speakers are Thomas Vander Wal - credited with creating the term folksonomies; and Leslie Owens from Forrester - author of many insightful articles.

From the KMWorld announcement --

At Taxonomy Boot Camp 2009 attendees will learn about:

• Creating and implementing successful taxonomies
• Enhancing your information infrastructure with the right taxonomy
• Taxonomy design concepts and strategies
• New technologies & tools and where the market is headed
• Selecting the right metadata, taxonomy approach, and tools for your environment
• Evaluating auto-categorization schemes and tools
• Managing the build, buy, or automate decision
• Working collaboratively with your content and stakeholders
• Case studies,lessons learned, and best practices
• Measuring and demonstrating the business impact and ROI
• Managing and growing a taxonomy

Semantic Web and the work of librarians

Can Librarians Be Put Directly Onto the Semantic Web? by Eric Hellman, go to Hellman (Aug 4, 2009)

What does semantic web mean to librarians? It may mean moving away from an orientation to the human user when creating metadata, to constructing for the machine.

"In many respects, the most important question for the library world in examining semantic web technologies is whether librarians can successfully transform their expertise in working with metadata into expertise in working with ontologies or models of knowledge. Whereas traditional library metadata has always been focused on helping humans find and make use of information, semantic web ontologies are focused on helping machines find and make use of information. Traditional library metadata is meant to be seen and acted on by humans, and as such has always been an uncomfortable match with relational database technology. Semantic web ontologies, in contrast, are meant to make metadata meaningful and actionable for machines. An ontology is thus a sort of computer program, and the effort of making an RDF schema is the first step of telling a computer how to process a type of information."

SLA Taxonomy Division

Taxonomy building gets additional recognition from SLA as it sets up a division for its members who work in this field.

SLA Now Has a Taxonomy Division!

The Division Chair is Marjorie M.K. Hlava. She wrote, “Taxonomies are widely used and increasingly proven to cut search time by more than 50 percent, increase worker productivity up to seven fold, and allow for location and application of mission-critical information throughout an organization. We are so pleased that SLA members and knowledge workers practicing in this area will be able join this network of taxonomy professionals within a premier professional organization with global reach.”

User Testing with Card Sorting

Card Sorting: Pushing Users Beyond Terminology Matches, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox (Aug 24)

Card sorting can be used for user testing of navigation.

As we learn from this article, "Card sorting is often a good way to get initial insights into users' mental model of an information space, and in our project it did indeed generate good starting point for the IA. After the card-sorting study, we conducted several rounds of user testing of wireframes, further refining the structure and how the site presented it. All of this effort would have been wasted if we'd gotten data on users' keyword-matching skills rather than on how they approach the site's target healthcare issues. "

Has worked examples.