What can go wrong with a taxnomy

Seth Earley lays out the 10 Common Mistakes When Developing a Taxonomy (July 23) There is a very important distinction between navigation and taxonomy. They aren't the same although a meaningful taxonomy can assist in navigating through content.

Taxonomy Governance

Three part series on taxonomy governance by Mike Doane at CMSWire. Covers development, maintenance, and growth. Has good checklists.

Learning from Joseph Busch

Taxonomy Tools Requirements and Capabilities - a presentation by Joseph Busch and Zachary Wahl (Project Performance Corporation) - steps us through tools for taxonomy editing, metadata tagging, and content management.

Joseph Busch is Founder and Principal consultant of Taxonomy Strategies. He speaks frequently at conferences and will be presenting "Adding Value to Content through Linked Data" at the SLA 2012 conference in July.

He makes his presentations available through archives on the Taxonomy Strategies website.

Nancy Brodie, who teaches courses at the iSchool Institute at the University of Toronto on metadata and controlled vocabulary as well as information management fundamentals, wrote:


"I think highly of Joseph Busch and he is very generous in making his presentations publicly available. This seems like a valuable one to note on your blog. It might also be useful for Taxonomy Guide."

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2011 Presentations

Presentations from Taxonomy Boot Camp, Oct 31 to Nov 1,2011, are available at http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2011/presentations.aspxhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

New Directions by Don Turnbull takes us on a tour of organizing data and information emotively (by mood), for the individual - the personal taxonomy, behavioral patterns, judgement - ratings and permissions, and lastly, the one we know a bit more about, semantics and clustering.

Very interesting example of working with taxonomies in the presentation on Rebuilding Taxonomy Warehouse as an Ontology from Dave Clarke at Synaptica International.

Gary Carlson has good advice and amusing examples in Avoiding the Autobiographical Taxonomy

Other well known presenters include Heather Hedden, Patrick Lambe, Seth Earley, Tom Reamy.

Taxonomy Management Tools

New Advisory Paper: Taxonomy Management Tools, Angela Guess, Semantic Web (Nov 17)

Costs money but could be useful -- "New Taxonomy Management Advisory Paper from The Real Story Group(PRWEB) November 15, 2011

The Real Story Group just released a new Advisory Paper: "Taxonomy Management Tools: A Comparative Evaluation." Taxonomy management tools have become a key player in end-to-end architectures for tackling content organization challenges, but the tools vary substantially in approach, and the marketplace as a whole remains somewhat immature, according to The Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates web and enterprise technologies."

ConceptSearching - taxonomy webinar for Sharepoint 2010

Concept Searching, a partner of Microsoft, offers a webinar on setting up a taxonomy with Sharepoint 2010 - August 10, 2011

Webinar: Leveraging Taxonomy Term Store for SharePoint - defining a multi-taxonomy structure for content management - "Get your arms around your business content. Best practices to designing a taxonomy and metadata schema to work with the Term Store for SharePoint 2010! "

Details at Microsoft Events - Click to Attend

Also check recorded webinars for previous topics.

Webinar on Msater Data Management

Taxonomy & Master Data Management - free webinar from Earley and Associations - June 23, 2011

"The approaches discussed are key to harmonizing disparate sources of data with a master data management architecture. We also provide insights into tool capabilities needed to support complex data mapping by overviewing capabilities of Oracle's PDQ (Product Data Quality) suite."

Upcoming Webinars at Earley and Associates

Earley & Associates has three webinars scheduled for April to May on various aspects and technologies for information management.

+ Sharepoint Case Study with Ford Foundation
+ From Supplier to Consumer - Optimizing the Information Supply Chain in the Retail Industry
+ Taxonomy & Metadata Management in Healthcare

Quoting from the email:

"We are pleased to have three very different events coming up. First up, this Wednesday, is a nuts and bolts discussion about developing a content strategy and IA in SharePoint. Our guest is Nicki Lodico, an Information Management Manager at the Ford Foundation. If you want the inside story on a real life, successful, SharePoint implementation you won't want to miss this session.

At the end of the month some of our top consultants will be discussing how a few leading retailers have been pushing the envelope using taxonomy and metadata to improve efficiency and increase sales. If any part of your business is ecommerce, you will want to join us for this session.

Looking ahead to May, we have Dr. Christian Reich joining us to talk about his experience with inter-relating data coded with disparate vocabularies and classification systems in healthcare systems. Dr. Reich's work is fascinating and you'll want to put this on your calendar no matter what business you are in. "

Details at http://www.earley.com/webinars/upcoming

Taxonomy Guide - Resource List

An updated version of The Taxonomy Guide is now available from The iSchool Institute of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. This is an online resource and learning tool about why and how to build and implement a taxonomy for an organization. It is available by annual subscription - details at the Institute page, The Taxonomy Guide.

There is a demo site for the Taxonomy Guide with the table of contents and a resource list of books, articles, organizations, and communities for anyone interested in this field.

Analyzing Data from Card Sorting

Dancing with the Cards: Quick-and-Dirty Analysis of Card-Sorting Data, Shanshan Ma, UXMatters (Sept 20)

Card sorting can be a good way to learn from users how they group information - to get their perspective on organizing content. It is often used as a step in building a navigational taxonomy. This article describes two types of card sorting: open and closed.

But it does have its challenges. Invariably each person will have a different take on how things should be sorted and the labels to be attached. This article introduces wasy of analyzing the data to see the patterns.

"Card sorting is a great method of understanding users’ interpretations of a Web site’s structure. Through my experiences using card sorting, I have recognized that there are several challenges with using the method—in particular with data analysis and the presentation of results. To address these challenges, my colleagues and I have employed spreadsheets to visually represent card-sorting data and present the results of studies to clients, and we have received positive feedback from them. My experiences have also demonstrated that gathering additional insights from card-sort participants through questionnaires and providing more context for participants add value to the method. User research practitioners should consider enriching the results of their card sorts by taking the approaches I’ve described".

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.

Taxonomy Tools

Tools for Managing Taxonomies (or Thesauri, or Ontologies) by Heather Hedden, Earley and Associates (March 5)

Good overview of current tools for developing and maintaining a taxonomy - talks about requirements and names tools.

"There is a need for tools that do more than merely enabling manual adding and deleting of terms. Mapping two taxonomies is something that only a few tools support, but there are many other day-to-day taxonomy management activities that also require specialized taxonomy management software."

Taxonomies and new technology

The Death of Taxonomies, revisited by Theresa Regli, CMS Watch (Nov 13)

Technology of text mining, entity extraction and semantic analysis is doing the grunt work of taxonomists. Theresa Regli foresees change in the life and work (and even name) of the taxonomist.

"Taking taxonomies beyond what technology can achieve on its own is the metadata architect’s challenge for the next decade, because technology is at the point where it achieves what taxonomists were doing a decade ago."

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.”

Developing Taxonomies

Ontologies, Taxonomies, Thesauri: Learning from Texts, by Christopher Brewster and Yorick Wilks; Department of Computer Science, University of She±eld, She±eld, UK (2004)

On automating the creation of taxonomies:

"This paper takes the approach that, given the `info-smog' we live in (AKT 2001), hand-crafting is impractical and undesirable. While it is still a major research challenge to construct ontologies entirely automatically, the current tools available from the Natural Language Processing community make it possible to automate the task to a large extent and reduce manual input to where it makes the most qualitative di®erence. In Section 2, we describe discuss in greater detail the problem of manually constructing ontologies and argue for the use of text corpora as the main source of knowledge. In Section 3, we present a number of criteria as a guide for the method that need to be used for the automation of ontology construction. In Section 4, we present a number of methods for constructing ontologies from texts based on the criteria presented. Section 5 considers how to bridge the gap between the implicit knowledge assumed by a given text and the actual explicit knowledge present in the texts."

Concept Searching

Getting to the point, KMWorld (Mar 18, 2009)

Sharepoint, taxonomies, and automatic classification seem to come together in ConceptSearching

"Content Types can be used to enforce metadata governance, adhere to policies and drive workflows in line with business processes. Included in the new release is the ability to assign taxonomies to specific Content Types. Documents that correspond to the selected Content Types will be classified and documents that do not correspond to a content type or do not include some metadata elements that a specific content type has specified will not be classified."

Learn more about ConceptSearching's conceptClassifier and its capabilities for metadata generation, taxonomy classification, and taxonomy creation at http://www.conceptsearching.com/web/

Page also links to case studies such as Microsoft's Two Page Partner Case Study
(2008)

Taxonomies are not a quick fix

Taxonomy: Silver Bullet or Shallow Puddle by Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search (Sept 2008)

You can count on Stephen Arnold to not pull punches. Everybody is talking about taxonomy as the ultimate solution to information retrieval. But do they appreciate how difficult it is to do well?

Arnold answers his question - "Why are taxonomies perceived as the silver bullet that will kill the vampire search or CMS system" - with five points that mainly show that people think taxonomies are a) a quick fix, and b) easy to create especially with the aid of software. Neither is true.

Txaonomy Bootcamp 2009

Dates are set for the 2009 Taxonomy Bootcamp conference in San Jose, California. Theme is Organizing and Optimizing Information. Dates are November 19-20

http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2009/

From the announcement:

"Sessions and speakers will explore the state of taxonomies and the technologies involved, and challenge you to consider how taxonomies and information organization approaches are evolving and where you'll fit in that future. The program highlights case studies, practical and thought-engaging sessions on ontologies, folksonomies, taxonomies in Sharepoint, lessons learned, metrics, demonstrating value, governance, and taxonomy management."

Taxonomy Building Process

Taxonomy and Glossaries for Enterprise Search Terminology by Lynda Moulton, Enterprise Search Practice Blog, Gilbane Group (Jan 21)

Lynda Moulton points to a problem that bedevils anyone who works to organize information through categorization - terminology changes.

"Taxonomies are never static, and require periodic review, even when the amount of content is small. Taxonomists need to keep pace with current use of terminology and target audience interests. New jargon creeps in although I prefer to use generic and terms broadly understood in the technology and business world."

She describes her method for gathering and defining terms related to enterprise search (one which involves validation through web searches), and for keeping this current with new discoveries and developments in the industry.

We see what can be done in the glossary for search and text retrieval that is attached to her posting.

Metadata, as one example, received this clear definition: "Explicitly defined labels for structuring content that describes any document or file regardless of the native format."

This posting is a very helpful worked example of an approach for developing and growing a controlled vocabulary or taxonomy.

Building an ECM Taxonomy

Forrester has published a guide to creating taxonomies -- How To Build A High-Octane Taxonomy For ECM And Enterprise Search Systems (Nov 17, 2008). Forrester makes the point that "... it's vital to enrich the content that flows through these systems with more meaningful and structured metadata. Enriched content is simply easier to isolate, promote, find, and control." Table of contents is provided in the document excerpt.

Cost is $379 US but there is a promise of full refund in the first 3 weeks if you aren't satisfied.