Taxonomy Boot Camp 2009

Taxonomy Boot Camp coming up November 19-20, 2009, in San Jose, California.

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

Making content discoverable is the job of a well-constructed, robust taxonomy — and a mission-critical objective for today’s organizations. Designed, developed, implemented, and managed effectively, a taxonomy or categorization scheme ensures people are finding and using precise information in myriad internal data collections and websites.

Getting Best of Both Worldsto

Folksonomies: Business Use,by Fran Alexander. FUMSI (May 2009)

Finds strengths and weaknesses in using folksonomies in business depending upon how much precision and recall is needed. Sums it up as "Business contexts where precision and recall are not important tend to be in less process-critical areas or where individual content items are not business critical, such as wikis, blogs, or corporate social networking sites."

Provides a comparison of characteristics for folksonomies and the taxonomy.

Proposes that we should aim at getting "best of both worlds" and presents "suggested contexts" for using each.

Folksonomies Essential

Survival for the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization by Alexis Wichowski, First Monday 14.5 (May 2009)

Abstract: "Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies."

Especially note conclusion:

"Folksonomies may be flawed, but they are, at present, the best means known to track what is happening with the non–mainstream of the information environment. If the greatest evolutionary changes in the biological environment — the birth of new species — occur not at the center but in the long tail, what great new transformations may be occurring in the long tail of the information environment? Tagging provides this outlying information, published far from the mainstream, a chance to be found, to be considered useful, and ultimately, to survive."

Card Sorting for Categories

All About Card Sorting: An Interview with Donna Spencer by Steve Baty, UX Matters (May 25)

From the introduction to the interview transcript:

"Donna Spencer is one of Australia’s best-known information architects, organizer of the UX Australia conference, and a frequent presenter at UX conferences in Australia, the US, and Europe. I caught up with Donna between her appearances at the IA Summit and RedUX DC to talk about card sorting and her new book, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, which Rosenfeld Media recently published."

MeSH Training Course

National Library of Medicine has a free online course on Using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) in Cataloging


http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/trainingcourses/mesh/index.html

Some of the thinking that goes into subject analysis for cataloging applies in building taxonomies. And of course, MeSH is a taxonomy itself.

(All examples are current as of the 2009 release of MeSH)

Tags - Not so Useful

Do Tags Work?, by Cathy Marshall

Tags are deeply entrenched in the Web now - and likely enterprises. But - here's the question we all ask - "But are the tags that people create really an effective way of describing information so that it can be found and managed, folded and put in the right drawer?" Mr Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger, extols social tagging.

Cathy Marshall undertook her own study, in which she gathered and closely analyzed the metadata on 322 Flick images of the floor of the Galleria in Milan. She looked at tags, descriptions, and title - and found more useful words in the latter two. Tags, she said, "can be a rich source of noise"... "The message here is almost painful: a great proportion of user tags add little or no further information; as such, they don't appear as often in narratives or titles."

Could they be made useful? Taggers would have to be more specific - and that's not likely to happen.

MetaVis Graphical Metadata Tools

Managing SharePoint taxonomies, KMWorld (Apr 20)

MetaVis Technologies builds visual metadata management tools. ARCHITECT is for creating metadata and hierarchies.

"MetaVis Technologies has released MetaVis ARCHITECT for SharePoint, which gives information architects, developers, consultants and administrators the capability to design, document and deploy SharePoint objects using a graphical tool."

Trial version available.

Social Tagging Studies

Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework

Trant, Jennifer (2009) Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework. Journal of Digital Information 10(1).

Abstract

"This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the
contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging
(and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature"

Vivisimo's Enterprise Search

Vivisimo Releases New Multimedia Outreach, Stan, Enterprise Search Center,

Vivisimo, a provider of enterprise search solutions, tells us more about them through Stan, a series of videos, blogs and other social media.

"The Meet Stan campaign includes a website (meetstan.com), videos, and social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter. Stan’s videos, available on meetstan.com and YouTube, describe different aspects of enterprise search. After an introductory video, the initial series will focus on the three critical dimensions of search—discovery, personalization and collaboration. Stan also has a blog on the website where he discusses his search and collaboration dilemmas and how enterprise search can help."

Why Stan? Why not Stephanie or Sue? Anyway - to meet Stat go to http://meetstan.com/

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."