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."

Improving enterprise search

Huge problems for search in the enterprise Pandia, Dec 18, 2011

Enterprise search is not web search. It involves searching across disparate database. This article has some data on how bad search is - "some employees spend up to two hours per day searching for information in intranets and enterprise search tools"

The findings and discussion come from a report from The Digital Workplace by Stephan Schillerwein available from Infocentric Research.

"According to Schillerwein, one of the main reasons for the problems of enterprise search is the lack of context. In days of old, information in the enterprise was found by secretaries — real persons, not computerized assistants — who knew who you were, what your job was and what you were currently working. A search engine has none of this context. "

Schillerwein takes a very personal approach - what the employees does, needs, and prefers. There is no mention of an enterprise taxonomy

Landscape of Enterprise Search - book

A short introduction to enterprise search, Pandia (Dec 10)

Short presentation with highlights from Stephen Arnold's book, The Landscape of Enterprise Search. You can buy the book for a mere 20 USD.

More about finding the right solution at Pandia Enterprise Search.

Introduction to taxonomies and thesauri

LLRX has picked up Gail Rayburn's presentation on Taxonomies and Thesauri to the Washington DC SLA chapter. (Nov 1, 2011). It's a very good primer to the terms and structure, and a guide to how to go about building one. Includes a brief introduction to ontologies as well.

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.