Taxonomy Watch

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2009

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:06 GMT

Taxonomy Boot Camp coming up November 19-20, 2009, in San Jose, California.

http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2009/

Making content discoverable is the job of a well-constructed, robust taxonomy — and a mission-critical objective for today’s organizations. Designed, developed, implemented, and managed effectively, a taxonomy or categorization scheme ensures people are finding and using precise information in myriad internal data collections and websites.

Getting Best of Both Worldsto

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:24 GMT

Folksonomies: Business Use,by Fran Alexander. FUMSI (May 2009)

Finds strengths and weaknesses in using folksonomies in business depending upon how much precision and recall is needed. Sums it up as "Business contexts where precision and recall are not important tend to be in less process-critical areas or where individual content items are not business critical, such as wikis, blogs, or corporate social networking sites."

Provides a comparison of characteristics for folksonomies and the taxonomy.

Proposes that we should aim at getting "best of both worlds" and presents "suggested contexts" for using each.

Folksonomies Essential

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:13 GMT

Survival for the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization by Alexis Wichowski, First Monday 14.5 (May 2009)

Abstract: "Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies."

Especially note conclusion:

"Folksonomies may be flawed, but they are, at present, the best means known to track what is happening with the non–mainstream of the information environment. If the greatest evolutionary changes in the biological environment — the birth of new species — occur not at the center but in the long tail, what great new transformations may be occurring in the long tail of the information environment? Tagging provides this outlying information, published far from the mainstream, a chance to be found, to be considered useful, and ultimately, to survive."

Card Sorting for Categories

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:10 GMT

All About Card Sorting: An Interview with Donna Spencer by Steve Baty, UX Matters (May 25)

From the introduction to the interview transcript:

"Donna Spencer is one of Australia’s best-known information architects, organizer of the UX Australia conference, and a frequent presenter at UX conferences in Australia, the US, and Europe. I caught up with Donna between her appearances at the IA Summit and RedUX DC to talk about card sorting and her new book, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, which Rosenfeld Media recently published."

MeSH Training Course

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:02 GMT

National Library of Medicine has a free online course on Using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) in Cataloging

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/trainingcourses/mesh/index.html

Some of the thinking that goes into subject analysis for cataloging applies in building taxonomies. And of course, MeSH is a taxonomy itself.

(All examples are current as of the 2009 release of MeSH)