Tag Archives: taxonomy

information architecture

Folksonotaxonomies

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I’ve recently had fascinating conversations with two professional taxonomists – one at EDS and one at the BBC – and both use very different but imaginative and innovative combinations of folksonomic and traditional taxonomic procedures.

All the best taxonomists advocate consulting as much as possible with your users, which is obvious, and a folksonomy is pretty much a glorified mass user consultation exercise. But why stop with the consultation stage?

You still get an awful lot of noise to your signal in folksonomies and the best way to clear that is still to apply some trained thoughtful evaluation – the principles of taxonomy. The combined approach gives you the best of both worlds – gather the tags as a folksonomy (you still need a critical mass of taggers), and then do a bit of pruning and tidying to make them work properly. Ideal!

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information management

Folksonomy backlash

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

First person: ‘Folksonomy’ takes power from expert librarians, an article by David Bowen of Bowen Craggs & Co in the Financial Times‘s Digital Business section on November 7th highlights some of the advantages of having a well-crafted carefully structured taxonomy instead of relying on folksonomies. He says that folksonomies are great in some cases, but that really valuable information is by definition specialised and therefore doesn’t get read by enough people for mass social tagging to be helpful.

I think there are two key limitations to the usefulness of the folksonomic approach. Firstly, you need loads of people. If you don’t have a huge number of people actively tagging – and only huge mass market websites do – you don’t generate a large enough data set to get a decent signal-to-noise ratio. Secondly, it has to be of no consequence if chunks of your content are never found due to weird or bad tagging. This is fine for Flickr, say, where people just want any old picture, not to see all the pictures. It’s not so great if you want to make sure you have checked every one – that you’ve looked at all the relevant legislation, for example, not just the first couple of laws that happened to pop up.

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information architecture

Taxonomies: start here

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No taxonomy blog would be complete without a link to this:
Understanding information taxonomy helps build better apps.

It seems to be the article that everyone comes back to (or starts off with). A clear and simple explanation of how taxonomies form the backbone of most information architecture. I also noted a couple of good points about how the semantic web won’t run without them – a topic I intend to return to!

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biography

Welcome to Vocab Control

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Welcome to my new blog. I am just starting a Master of Research degree at University College London studying taxonomies. I am now getting pretty good at explaining what they are but I’m not going to do that here. Suffice it to say that if you think I am going to write about stuffed animals or the Inland Revenue, you’re in the wrong place!

My first real encounter with taxonomical systems was during the 1990s when I worked as an editor of reference books, working on such titles as the Collins English Dictionary, the Macmillan Encyclopedia, and the Hutchinson Encyclopedia and Almanac. In between learning when to use “which” and “that” and spot a typo at 40 paces, I was assigned to the thesaurus team. Eventually, I was given the wonderful task of devising the structure for a new edition of the UK’s first fully electronically compiled general language thesaurus, for Bloomsbury. Creating a hierarchy of everything was an incredible project and left me fascinated by the grey areas and the concepts that ooze like slime moulds from one category to another.

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