Legal Research

Taxonomies - reanimated or dying?

By scott

The Current issue of Online has an article by Seth Earley entitled ‘The New Versus Old Schools of Taxonomies, Metadata,and Information Architecture’ which takes as its starting point a prediction from CMS Watch that predicted with the rise of social computing that ‘Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata’.

Earley is having none of this and argues that far from being dead, taxonomies are more important than ever.

He identifies that this line of thinking might be because of the old view of taxonomies, where taxonomy = navigation and nothing more. In today’s world, with methods such as faceted search, the worlds of navigation and search merge behind the scenes. “[B]uilding out faceted search and filtering based on attributes requires a well constructed taxonomy. The controlled vocabularies of their taxonomy drive choices for the facets, and hierarchies allow users to refine their choices intuitively.”

He makes a convincing case for for having multiple taxonomies too - something I have had many pro and con discussions about over the years. According to Earley “Multiple taxonomies are needed to “represent various perspectives within the organisation.” On its own this might be statement you’d question but he goes on to make a very important point.

“Do not confuse this with having multiple navigational hierarchies. A navigational hierarchy is an access structure. It is dependent upon the context being indexed. However, building multiple taxonomies and surfacing them within new tools will allow for maximum flexibility in navigational constructs.”

He concludes by saying that to survive taxonomies need to evolve and change with the needs of the organisation and also with the changes in technology, but that they still have an important role to play in how we access information and mine internal knowledge effectively. Worth a read.

Full post as published by Information Overload on April 22, 2009 (boomark / email).