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FreePint's new categories developed for easier access to articles in VIP and FUMSI on information tools and strategies provide an excellent definition and introduction to this space. Content managemnent, taxonomy, intranet are only three.


From Big Data Discovery, by Michelle Manafy, Freepint (March 2012)

"It is with this in mind that here at FreePint we are introducing a range of discovery tools to improve our users' ability to determine quickly which information resources are likely to be of value to meet individual needs. First among these is the introduction of FreePint Categories, which provide both solution-oriented (Industry Topics) and job-related (Functional Areas) categorisation. These categories will also be visible with abstracts of articles, to help users more quickly skim and find content worth clicking through and reading (or sharing with staff). These categories draw content from across the entire FreePint family of resources and each category has its own RSS feed so that users can create more targeted content alerts."

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.

The Case for Auto-Classification

A Stream of Auto-Classification Consciousness by Randolph Kahn, ESQ, Information Nation (Feb 29)

Why not do more auto-classification of data? Lawyers do for e-discovery cases. People are notoriously poor at indexing content - (unless they are trained indexers we might hastily add)

"We have empirical data to support the proposition that employees classify and code information way worse than computers, by a long shot. Yet most companies continue to rely on their employees to manage information. “[T]echnology-assisted process, in which only a small fraction of the document collection is ever examined by humans, can yield higher recall and/or precision than an exhaustive manual review process, in which the entire document collection is examined and coded by humans."

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."

Guided by an information architect

E3 Content Strategy Blog has an article on How Taxonomy and Metadata Leads to Findability by Theresa Putkey (Feb 6).

She notes that, "Taxonomy and metadata are becoming much more popular these days", and offers several resources for newcomers to the field to learn more.

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."

AIIM in Montreal

AIIM will be in Montreal on February 21, 2012 to present in French a session on Design and Implemention of Taxonomies. Presenter is Julie Nadeau. More information and registration at

On Organizing Content with Tags

Thom Johnson at I'd Rather be Writing has been writing a series of posts on findability - or more precisely - organizing content. There are 50 entries since 2010. It's eclectic - simulation, navigation, faceted - and much more. One one Using Tags to Increase Findability explores the value of tags as metadata. He draws from a book by Gene Smith - Tagging, People Powered Metadata for the Social Web.

Digital Workplace

This post in the VIP LiveWire forum - Can search replace "the perfect secretary"? - alerts us to a growing problem in organizations - that of making decisions based on data. It leads to two major studies: a survey on unstructured data, and one on the digital workplace.

The Swiss-based Infocentric Research published The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age. Its director of research, Stephan Schillerwein, observed that "Searching can take up to two hours of each working day".

Solutions are needed. The Infocentric Research whitepaper on the digital workplace and information management might help.

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."