Taxonomy and Glossaries for Enterprise Search Terminology – Enterprise Search Practice Blog has a handy little glossary from indexer and heavy user of controlled vocabularies Lynda Moulton (via Taxonomy Watch).
Having spent years working as an editor fussing over consistency of style and orthography, I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to find my tags on even this little blog site, written solely by me, had already become a mess. It didn’t take too long to tidy them up, but there are only a handful of articles here so far. I worked with some extremely clever people in my first “proper” job back in the 90s, and we used to have a “90%” rule regarding algorithmic-based language processing (we mostly processed very well-structured text). However brilliant your program,... Read more »
I’m still mulling over Helen Longino’s criteria for objectivity in scientific enquiry (see previous post: Science as Social Knowledge) and it occurred to me that folksonomies are not really open and democratic, but are actually obscure and impenetrable. The “viewpoint” of any given folksonomy might be an averaged out majority consensus or some other way of aggregating tags might have been used, and so you can’t tell if it is skewed by a numerically small but prolifically tagging group. This is the point Judith Simon made in relation to ratings and review software systems at the ISKO conference, but it... Read more »
I can’t help thinking the information world has become very morbid. There was Green Chameleon’s Dead KM Walking debate, CMS Watch’s Taxonomies are dead punt, and now keyword search is dead, according to the Enterprise Search Center (via Taxonomy Watch). Stephen Arnold says “Established system vendors and newcomers promise silver bullets that will kill the werewolves plaguing enterprise search. Taxonomies resonate in some vendors’ marketing spiels. Others focus on natural language processing… ” This makes taxonomies sound like they are some new fangled techie trick, rather than the traditional sorting out we’re all used to. He then states that users... Read more »
I thoroughly enjoyed Science as Social Knowledge by the US philosopher Helen Longino. It was recommended to me by Judith Simon, a very smart researcher I met at the ISKO conference in Montreal last summer. She researches trust and social software and suggested that Longino’s analysis of objectivity would be helpful to me. It took me a while to get settled with the book, but I recognised an essentially Wittgensteinian take on the notion of shared meaning. Longino works this into a set of principles for establishing degrees of objectivity in scientific enquiry. If I have grasped it all correctly,... Read more »
I haven’t read the book yet, but this blog post on screen templates presents 12 basic layouts and the sort of information they work best with. It could be a useful checklist if you want to manage or rationalise presentations across a large website, especially one that has evolved organically and could do with tidying up. The templates are simple (seasoned designers won’t find much they don’t know already) but could be handy for anyone new to web design and layout who wants some “off the peg” styles to get them started. Thanks to Rey for the link!
I’ve been studying usability evaluation methods (UEMs), which although not directly related to taxonomy work, are relevant for anyone involved in information architecture (IA). I was surprised at how controversial a subject usability is, having assumed that everyone wants their sites to be as usable as possible. However, assessing usability does involve a lot of judgement calls and tradeoffs, which is one reason why some people seem to take against it. You have to decide who you are going to focus your usability testing on, perhaps choosing a “core user group” rather than trying to please everybody. You have to... Read more »
I’ve been mulling over what to say about CMS Watch’s “Taxonomies are Dead” teaser, but defer to Patrick Lambe of Green Chameleon, who has written a very good post in response: Organising Knowledge » What Are We?. One thought of my own is that there seems to be increasing differentiation between taxonomy creators and implementers (which I take as a sign that taxonomies are thriving rather than dying). I’ve always been on the content side of things, so I see knowledge organisation as primary, and the technology you use as secondary. However, more and more it seems to be the... Read more »
Truevert: What is semantic about semantic search? is an easy introduction to the thinking behind the Truevert semantic search engine. I was heartened by the references to Wittgenstein and the attention Truevert have paid to the work of linguists and philosophers. So much commercial search seems to have been driven by computer scientists with little interest in philosophy, or if they did they kept quiet about it (any counter examples out there?)! Perhaps philosophers have not been so good at promoting themselves either. Perhaps the Chomskyian attempt to divide linguistics itself into “hard scientific” linguistics and “fuzzy” linguistic disciplines like... Read more »
Taxonomy and Records Management « Not Otherwise Categorized… is a blog post I wish I’d read a year ago when studying a records management module for my Masters. A lot of people seemed to think it was strange that I had chosen the RM option and I couldn’t understand why the records managers didn’t talk more about taxonomy. Of course, taxonomists often work on records management systems in one form or another, and are happy to discuss the differences between taxonomy as file plan, taxonomy for RM, taxonomy as classification, taxonomy for navigation, and so on. I think it shows... Read more »