Stephanie Lemieux's Favourite Tipples

Taxonomy and content management consultant Stephanie Lemieux offers her favourite sites at the Freepint bewsletter column, My Favourite Tipples (March 2012. She tracks taxonomy development, information architecture, search, user interface dessign - showing the breadth of fields that relate to the taxonomy specialist.

Of interest - Pinterest, the new image social bookmarking tool, is on her list. "...what first drew me was the quickly-growing collection of examples of interesting navigation and search design. It will be interesting to see how the community grows and evolves over time" - and she names some boards.

Webinar about taxonomy and navigation

Does Taxonomy Equal Navigation? - new webinar from Earley and Associates - free with registration - March 7, 2012 at 1 pm.

"Taxonomies can be informative in designing better navigation, but it’s only part of the story. And while navigation requirements can inform taxonomy, they shouldn’t determine taxonomy organization."

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."

Content Choreography Seminar Series

Fascinating new 4-part webinar series coming up at Earley and Associates - Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography Is Critical to Information Management

"Dynamic content management combines sophisticated use of taxonomy and content metadata to choreograph and assemble information based on various factors – who the user is, what step in a process they are engaged in, what information they need to execute a task, the topics they are interested in, etc."

The Earley newsletter described content choreography very cleverly -- "Taxonomy and metadata have the potential to be so much more than just strings on a content puppet (although they certainly act that way at a minimum). That's where the choreography part comes in - planning, composing, organizing, presenting, reacting to audience interaction in a controlled yet artful way. It's like the difference between your last high school dance and the Cirque du Soleil."

There is an accompanying slideshow presentation with definitions, process for building, and application.

Starts September 15, 2011

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."

Webinar Series on Business Taxonomies

ASIS&T and PPC Taxonomy Webinar Series

ASIS&T and the Project Performance Corporation are putting on a four part webinar series on design and management of business taxonomies.

"The first session in the series will provide an introduction to taxonomy and metadata benefits, design concepts, and strategies. The subsequent sessions will detail methodologies on 1) how to run taxonomy design workshops within your own organization, 2) how to design taxonomies from start to finish, and 3) how to ensure the appropriate maintenance and management of those taxonomies over time. "

Dates: Nov 5, 8, 10, and 12, 2010

It's free to ASIS&T members, and $49 US / session for non-members.

The other taxonomists

The Globe and Mail has reported on a decline in taxonomists - the kind that classify flora and fauna.

The Case of the vanishing taxonomists by Matthew Hart, Globe and Mail, Sept 4, 2010

Why are there fewer traditional taxonomists who can examine the physical traits in a specimen, classify it and name it? Partly, it's a change to molecular taxonomy.

"Younger scientists are drawn to molecular taxonomy, where powerful new techniques in the study of DNA have revealed interspecies connections never before suspected.

Such advances, including the Canadian-pioneered use of DNA barcodes to identify species, while undeniably useful, are “not a replacement for the [traditional] taxonomist,” says Gary Saunders, who holds a chair in Molecular Systematics and Biodiversity at the University of New Brunswick.

“At times, the DNA-generated answer is wrong,” Prof. Saunders says. “A trained taxonomist can look at a molecular result and know that there is cause to question the outcome.” "

Does this seem similar to the view that content in enterprises does not need to be classified - it can simply be analyzed at the word (molecular) level to be found and used?

Taxonomists in Information Management aren't looking for new species, but they should be looking for new views and new topics that relate to the business and make sense of it.

Determining Classes

Skills of a Classy Taxonomist, The Taxonomy Blog, (Aug 10)

It appears than taxonomy and ontology are not quite the same but they do have a common base. At a SemTech conference the consensus seems to have been that, "Taxonomists build hierarchies, and ontologists determine classes or categories."

Author goes on to describe the use of class (or facet) analysis.

"Defining classes or ontology work typically precedes building the taxonomy. Defining the classes is like writing a specification for the taxonomy; in fact defining classes is the same as defining facets. The goal of a taxonomist and ontologies should be to define a specific, unambiguous description of a term that helps manage how we find and organize content so the pathways are clear and specific; adding an ontology ensures that the term is placed in the most specific categories to help ensure clarity and lack of ambiguity."

Modelling strategies are needed to do this well. Posting mentions some tools and approaches.

Taxonomy Basics

Taxonomy: A “Disambiguation”, Content Strategy Noob (Jun 18)

The Content Strategy noob noted that many people are confused about what taxonomy really does, "The confusion", he noted, "centered on how the idea of taxonomy relates to—and differs from—other elements of Information Architecture, such as sitemaps and navigation. Are they the same thing? Is it just your metadata?" Web taxonomies are described with examples and how they are part of the information architecture.

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."

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."

Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft Sharepoint

SharePartXXL International GmbH provides "applications and solutions that add additional features to WSS and MOSS". Among these is the SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint.

From the e-mailing:

"The SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint enables documents and list items in a SharePoint-based portal to be organized cross-site as part of a connected content network and knowledge model. SharePoint items are associated by category using one or more custom taxonomies. So users can organize documents and other portal contents in the way that they think and work. With that extension
the SharePoint portal really can become a place to share knowledge as well as content:"

Details about the product are desribed on the Taxonomy Extension product page.

Taxonomy Directed Folksonomies

TAXONOMY DIRECTED FOLKSONOMIES -- Integrating user tagging and controlled vocabularies for Australian education networks -- by Sarah Hayman and Nick Lothian at education.au, 2007

This paper was presented at theWorld Library and Information Congress at the 2007 IFLA Conference.

It opens with the key question -- "What is the role of controlled vocabulary in a Web 2.0 world? Can we have the best of both worlds: balancing folksonomies and controlled vocabularies to help communities of users find and share information and resources most relevant to them?"

Paper includes a review of the growth and characteristics of user tagging and folksonomies on the Web. Throughout there is a discussion of the value that user tagging provides - along with some of the difficulties.

The aim is to examine if the folksonomy and formal taxonomy can be used together. The answer is Yes - and the authors have a proof of concept model that they are using at education.au.

"Is it possible to combine the two approaches and gain benefits from both? Some attempts have been made already and a few are mentioned here in a consideration of some future developments for social tagging. We then discuss our own model: the taxonomy-directed folksonomy for the myedna proof of concept."

New taxonomy at CIO.com

CIO.com has embraced many of the new Web 2.0 qualities in its revamped web site. CIO is published by IDG and appeals to the business and IT community; and now, with these improvements, it will be its own community.

Of note, are two navigational devices:

1) A new taxonomy covering technology and leadership.


2) A Google Custom Search that searches the CIO.com domain for content, and offers some standard tags for viewing the content: blogs, white papers, webcasts, advice/opinion.

Among the Web 2.0 elements are polls, RSS feeds, blogs with readers' comments and discussion.

Vendors will have more opportunity to add content, such as white papers and articles. Search for taxonomies as a start.

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)