Tag Archives: taxonomy

KO | search

Now keyword search is dead…

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

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 expect “a search system to … Offer a web page that gives users specific suggestions and options with hotlinks to topics, categories, and key subjects … provide the user with point­ and-click options … Allow the user to drill down or jump across topics.” Are those not taxonomies for navigation?

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Science as Social Knowledge

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

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, she basically says that although there is no such thing as “ideal” objectivity – a one true perspective up in the sky – we do not have to collapse into an “anything goes” relativism. We can accept that background assumptions can be challenged and change, and embed the notion of challenge and criticism into the heart of scientific enquiry itself. That establishes a self-regulating system that is more or less objective, depending on how open it is to criticism and how responsive it is to legitimate challenges. Objectivity arises out of the process of consensus-building in an open, reflective, and self-challenging community.

Applying this to taxonomy work appears to mean that the process of taxonomy building can be more or less objective, depending on how open the process is to the community and to adapting to legitimate challenges or complaints. This seems to be very much like the practical advice offered by taxonomists expressed in terms of “get user buy-in”, “consult all stakeholders”, “ensure that you consider all relevant viewpoints”, or “ensure that you have regular reviews and updates”, so it’s reassuring to know we are basically epistemologically valid in our methods!

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KO

Organising Knowledge » What Are We?

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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 case that people understand the word “taxonomist” to mean someone who is a sort of Sharepoint sysadmin.


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Taxonomy and Records Management

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

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 that there is really very little widespread understanding of what a taxonomy is. People assume it is something mysterious and technical in the heart of whichever system they encountered one in first and don’t realise that taxonomies crop up all over the place. It’s not even very easy to find an “official” definition.

Alan Gilchrist and Barry Mahon in Information Architecture: Designing Information Environments for Purpose say “TFPL takes the view that a ‘corporate taxonomy’ can be viewed as an enterprise-wide master file of the vocabularies and their structures, used or for use, across the enterprise, and from which specific tools may be derived for various purposes, of which navigation and search support are the most prominent.”

Patrick Lambe in Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness describes taxonomies as taking many forms, including “lists, trees, hierarchies, polyhierarchies, matrices, facets, system maps” and Vanda Broughton in Essential Classification points out that taxonomy is now often taken to mean “any vaguely structured set of terms in a subject area”.

Settling on a single, popular definition of taxonomy might help promote taxonomists and taxonomy work, but as taxonomies need to do so much in so many different contexts, there just might not be a simple definition that works. Perhaps we need a taxonomy of taxonomies!

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culture | KO

The Social Life of Information

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Estimated reading time 3–5 minutes

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid is an info classic. It’s one of those delightful books that manages to be very erudite, cover a huge range of theory, but reads effortlessly and even had me laughing out loud from time to time. (My favourite anecdote was that BT’s answer to homeworkers’ sense of isolation was to pipe a soundtrack of canned background noise and chatter into their offices!)

Essentially, the book argues that information and information technology cannot be separated from its social context and ignoring the human factors in technology adoption and use leads to fundamental misunderstandings of what it can and does do. This may mean overestimating the potential of information technology to change pre-existing institutions and practices, on both a personal and collective scale, and underestimating the ability of people to adapt technology to suit their ends rather than those envisaged by the technologists.

The authors argue that many “infoenthusiasts” miss subtleties of communication, such as the implicit social negotiations that take place in face-to-face conversations or the social meanings conveyed by a document printed on high quality paper or a book with expensive leather binding. Such nuances are easily lost when the words from such communications are removed from their original context and placed in a new environment – such as an electronic database.

Similarly, although personalisation is often touted as a great advance – you can have your own uniquley customised version of a website or a newspaper – such personalisation diminishes the power of the information source to act as a binding-point for a community. If we all have different versions of the newspaper, then we can’t assume we share common knowledge of the same stories. We then have to put additional work into reconnecting and recreating our knowledge communities, so the benefits of personalisation do not come without costs.

The importance of negotiation, collaboration, and improvisation is argued to be highly significant but extremely hard to build into automated systems. The social nature of language and the complexities of learning how to be a member of a community of practice, including knowing when to break or bend rules, are also essential to how human beings operate but extremely difficult to replicate in technological systems.

The theme of balance runs throughout the book – for example between the need to control processes while allowing freedom for innovation in companies or between the need for communication amongst companies and the need to protect intellectual property (knowledge in companies was often either seen as too “sticky” – hard to transfer and use – or too “leaky” – flowing too easily to competitors). At an institutional level, balance is needed between the importance of stability for building trust and openness to evolution (the perception of the value of a degree is bound up with the established reputation of an educational institution).

I found this very interesting, as my brother has been trying to persuade me that Daoism with its emphasis on things moving gradually from one state to another is a more productive way at looking at complex systems than the Aristotelian view that something can be in one category, or its opposite, but never both at once. (Here is a sisterly plug for an article he has written on the application of Daoist ideas to environmentalism). It also fits in with the idea of balancing the stability of an ordered taxonomy with the fast-flowing nature of folksonomies and of finding a way of using social media to support rather than compete with more formalised knowledge management practice. Brown and Duguid say: “For all the advantages of fluidity, we should not forget that fixity still has its charms. Most of us prefer the checks we receive and the contracts we write to remain stable”, which seems particularly apt given the global credit crisis!

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information architecture | information management | search

Online Information 2008 (London online)

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Estimated reading time 4–7 minutes

I went on Tuesday to Online 2008 at Olympia. It seemed quieter than last year, so I took advantage of some of the free presentations. I listened to Laurent Le Meur talking about Agence France-Presse (AFP)’s efforts to create a multimedia news database – (Imageforum), Graham Beastall of Soutron Ltd on Taxonomy Development using Sharepoint, Scott Gavin on Knowledge Plaza, and Judith Lewis of i-level on the Dark Side of Social Media.

Le Meur described the need to create a common metadata language to bring together journalists and photographers, who tended to think about subjects very differently. AFP use autocategorisation software (supplied by Temis) but have invested heavily in training it to work well, in other words lots of human input. They imported a number of existing vocabularies from such sources as GeoNames, EuroVoc, and the IPTC‘s taxonomy of news categories as a base, selecting 300 of the IPTC’s 1,300 categories to improve software performance. They currently extract and autocategorise people, organisations, locations, points of interest, products, and brands. They would realy like to be able to pick out news events, but language usage is too broad and diffuse for them to have managed this with any success.

Their documentalists and indexers were initially reluctant to work with the new system as it meant a dramatic reduction in the complexity of their indexing work. Previously they could use some 3,000 terms but this was reduced in order to be compatible with the entity extraction software.

For images, they found the key facets were expressions (e.g. smiling), action, aspect (e.g. profile, close-up) and style (e.g. backlit). They are happy with the Antidot faceted navigation system that allows them to choose index fields, but have not been able to incorporate image rights, as they are too complex and vary according to things like location of the user.

Beastall said that users of Sharepoint are not fully exploiting it, with only 4% using it as a tool for search, while 43% use it for collaborative working. He warned that you need to impose discipline in categorisation right from the start of an implementation as once information has “grown wild” it is far harder to retrospectively tidy it up. He also pointed out that people tend to think they know where to find things, but then someone else has a site reorganisation, so if key information wasn’t well indexed, it can be lost.

There is also value in segmenting your information so that you have public areas separate from the main enterprise content management system. Such public areas can then be treated differently in terms of things like security and social working. An interesting take on the taxo/folkso synergy is to let people build their own sites, but to have a central team looking out for good candidates for inclusion in centralised systems, and to bring personal sites in when they are useful, amalgamating to remove duplicates, etc. He encouraged the use of folksonomies as a “fast track” to sit beside the core vocabularies and feed into them, as folksonomies are particularly useful for new and fast-moving areas, but not so good for long term management and control. He cited the websites contentandcode.com – a Microsoft solutions provider, The Information Architecture Institute, a useful article on taxonomies, thesauruses, etc., by metamodel, and the Sharepoint blog vitalskill.com.

Knowledge Plaza is a CMS [Scott Gavin has pointed out that it is actually more a Knowledge Management/Enterprise Search tool – see his comment] that allows a dual taxo/folkso approach, with options for a totally open folkso system, a managed folkso system, where users can use any tag they like, but an administrator effectively builds a thesuarus in the background to link synonyms and prompt future users with preferred terms, and a totally controlled vocabulary.

Social search seemed to be a buzzword this year, and Gavin talked about a function that allowed you to “use people as search engines” but as far as I could tell, this actually meant the system simply recorded everybody’s search results, websites visited, etc., and then allowed other people to run a search on specific people’s collections of information. [Actually, the system runs live Google searches on the websites particular people have looked at, as well as emails, documents, etc associated with them or that are tagged a particular way – see Scott’s comment for more details].

Lewis’s talk wasn’t a cultural critique of the effect of social media on humanity, but a useful practical guide to how to avoid breaking the law and causing damage to brand reputation by using social media badly. Essentially – don’t pose as a genuine customer when you are working for a company and don’t disguise advertisements by making them indistinguishable from articles (which can be a bit of a grey area). She also suggested that it was better to have one company blog and get lots of people to contribute to it to keep it moving, than have lots of company blogs that are hardly ever updated.

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KO

Reductiones ad absurdum

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

In Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy Elaine Petersen argues that as folksonomy is underpinned by relativism, it will always be flawed as an information retrieval method. So, folksonomy will collapse because everything ends up tagged with every conceivable tag so they all cancel each other out and you might as well have not bothered tagging anything.

On the other hand, David Weinberger in Why tagging matters? claims that taxonomy will fail because taxonomists want to invent one single taxonomy to classify everything in the entire world and in a totalitarian style insist that the one true taxonomy is the only way to organise knowledge.

I have no idea who these mysterious megalomaniac taxonomists are. Most of the taxonomists I am aware of only advocate using one single taxonomy for fairly well defined and limited situations (e.g. a single company, or perhaps a department in a big corporation) and are quite happy with the notion that you need lots of different taxonomies suited to context, which makes them much more like Petersen’s relativists.

Conversely, I am fairly sure you can’t actually create an infinite folksonomy with infinite tags for all possible viewpoints of all possible documents (let alone smaller knowledge units). When your taggers are a specific community with a shared purpose, they probably will hit upon a shared vocabulary that is “universal” within the boundaries of that community and so the folksonomy will be meaningful.

I think that these reductio ad absurdum arguments are interesting because they highlight how both folksonomies and taxonomies are inherently flexible and even somewhat unstable, especially when they become large and very widely used. Intervention and management of both will help improve and maintain their usefulness. No matter whether you choose one or the other or a combination of the two, you still need knowledge workers to keep them in good working order!

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The Popularity Contest: Taxonomy Development in the Petabyte Era

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< 1 minute

The Popularity Contest: Taxonomy Development in the Petabyte Era « Not Otherwise Categorized…. I really enjoyed this excellent analysis of a familiar argument (let’s just Google for information), especially the emphasis on the difficulty of answering the question “why?”. When and where are quite easy ones, but why is really tricky! I also liked the straightforward assertion that bias is not just inevitable in taxonomy, it is what makes a good taxonomy.


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