Introduction to classification

A Brief History of Classification by Christine Connors, TriviumRLG LLC (Jan 10)

Humans have been classifying for as long as they have used a written language. One of the earliest examples is Pinakes at the Library of Alexandra. This short history takes us up to Ranganathan's Colon Classification in the 1900s, and observes that the first enterprise use was by publishers of indexes. On the web we have seen the classification structures of the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory Project. Today, "Pattern matching is the basis for much of what occurs in these systems for rules based categorization."

Visualizing the taxonomy

A thread in a SLA Taxonomy discussion group points to visualization tools for modelling a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary.

Prefuse.org - Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. "

Mind mapping can help. Some tools are:

- XMind> - very versatile tool - use it for brainstorming, or creating topic maps.

- MindJet / MindManager - FreeMind
- NovaMind
- iMindMap

- VisualMind - mind mapping with import / export and search functions.

-The Brain
- MindMeister

If building an ontology is the aim, Knoodl "facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases"

Or TopBraid from TopQuadrant - they say of their product - ""the world's most powerful graphical development environment for modelling data, connecting data sources, and designing queries, rules and semantic data processing chains."

Interest in Taxonomy Growing

Taxonomy: The New Hip, Miller Montague, Answer Maven (Aug 2)

Interesting post, and interesting blog. Taxonomy is the new hip, says Miller Montague. Yes - we are seeing new books, and more attention in conferences - even a division in SLA. Commenter raised a question about taxonomy being not strong enough to support semantic technology - and that an ontology was required. This may be semantics - though there is the view that the taxonomy is specific to an organization or subject area, and the ontology is for global use.

However, the reply was astute - "Ontologies and Taxonomies aim to bring order to chaos and customizing a company’s own information around their unique language and their cultural needs is why the two are useful."

Hakia's Commercial Ontology

A New Commercial Ontology from hakia by Dr. Riza C Berkan, Hakia (

CEO of Hakia, Dr Riza Berkan, proposes a Commercial Ontology that will serve the types of queries that users put to the web. Berkan says these have a "commercial pattern", but I suppose we could think of it as consumer interest just as easily. The key bit is -- "One particular distinction of the commercial pattern is that they come in short packages including a name (onomasticon), or always referring to something sold, bought, watched, heard, etc." Commercial Ontology will also work with sequence of words - which may be more efficient than individual terms.


Also see hakia Unveils Commercial Ontology, Search Engine Watch (July 30)