A wise taxonomist once said to me “taxonomies are technology agnostic” and I’ve been thinking about why systems are not taxonomy agnostic. If you underpin a taxonomy with a thesaurus, can you use that to map one taxonomy to another, without altering either taxonomy? You can keep both taxonomies as metadata attached to your asset and expose one or the other depending on user choice. It’s just an interface issue. The mapping would enable cross navigation, so you could wander down one taxonomy, skip to another, then pop back to the first one if you wanted.
You could attach folksonomies too if you wanted to, and just store those as extra metadata.
I can see that there might be terminology issues that need resolving (no small task), or perhaps software or storage issues, but I can’t see why the system itself couldn’t work in theory.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about mediating stakeholder needs to get the best taxonomy, and that is still a valid approach when you need management and control, but I don’t see any reason not to attach other taxonomies to your core taxonomy. Those satellite taxonomies can then serve minority interests or specialised needs. As long as you collect metadata about your taxonomies and make it clear to your user the provenance of the taxonomy or folksonomy they are viewing, you can offer a range of viewpoints.
Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but it seems there is still debate about getting the best taxonomy, or choosing to implement one instead of another. That debate seems to be based on the presumption that you can only have one taxonomy at a time, but why not have lots?
This is perfectly reasonable, Fran – local needs often required more limited taxonomies, vocabularies with more specialised meanings, geared to local needs. Taxonomy management systems such as Synaptica, Wordmap, Schemalogic allow you to manage multiple vocabularies and map the relationships behind them. It’s probably more than just a thesaurus, the relationships between the terms across the vocabularies may need to be defined more closely than just broader/narrower/related – eg “is an instance of” “is a technical term for”. I guess your main concern would be whether meaning can be tracked (and documented) consistently across the vocabularies.
Thank you, Patrick. It seemed to make sense to me in theory, but I had started to wonder why it hadn’t already been done here! I shall now go away and start seriously experimenting with the software you mention.