Organising Knowledge was a challenging book to write, because it is the first book I know of on taxonomy development that is explicitly aimed at practising knowledge managers. Much of the really good work out there comes out of library science or information studies referring to a much more generalised setting than those encountered by the knowledge manager – who typically works in organisations that are seeking pragmatic solutions to their information and knowledge needs centering on work-oriented documents, not publications. So there were no real precedents to rely on.
In writing the book, my intention was to frame the role of taxonomy work inside the larger knowledge management agenda. Hence, as far as I know, this is also the first taxonomy book that combines a practical guide to taxonomy development with a broader explanation of how taxonomy work contributes to knowledge management in a variety of ways.
As I worked on the book, I also realised increasingly that taxonomy work is not just useful in supporting information retrieval (which is the popular starting point for taxonomy projects), but as a key tool for supporting organisation effectiveness, expecially in supporting coordination across organisation boundaries.
I have tried hard to communicate a tricky subject in a clear, accessible style, and have been fortunate in people’s willingness to contribute detailed case studies to support the arguments I make here. A final chapter looks at where taxonomies sit in relation to folksonomies and ontologies. In this book, I hope, taxonomy work finally enters the knowledge management mainstream. If you buy the book, let me know what you think!
See inside the book:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Defining our terms
Chapter 2: Taxonomies can take many forms
Chapter 3: Taxonomies and infrastructure for organisation effectiveness
Chapter 4: Taxonomies and activities for organisation effectiveness
Chapter 5: Taxonomies and knowledge management
Chapter 6: What do we want our taxonomies to do?
Chapter 7: Preparing for a taxonomy project
Chapter 8: Designing your taxonomy
Chapter 9: Implementing your taxonomy
Chapter 10: The future of taxonomy work
Buy the book at:
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Barnes and Noble
DA Direct Australia (best online price I can find in Oz!)
Visit the publisher’s website (Chandos UK)
RESPONSES AND REVIEWS
Lots have people have reviewed and commented on the book, Here’s my favourite, from Kim Sbarcea: “Patrick has brought sexy back to taxonomies!”
For more reviewers’ comments, you’ll find a compilation here.
May 02
Faceted Filtering
Mike Padilla has a very good article on how to implement faceted filtering to help users narrow down their search choices. It’s not helped by kicking off with one of the most worst-constructed sentences I’ve seen this year (could have done with some stringent gobbledeygookery filters):
“A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.”
But fortunately it quickly lapses back into plain English. The article is strongest on explaining how to set up a friendly user-interface, and how that relates to the back-end search using the facets, in particular the logic and usability of the “and/or” search logic. There’s no help, unfortunately, on how to identify the prime facets that you want to use for the filters, probably because Mike’s focus is on internet sites and commerce applications, where the shoppers’ mental distinctions map to product attributes fairly straightforwardly. This is not so straightforward when applying faceted filtering to enterprise knowledge assets.
But a nice addition to the literature, and thanks to James Robertson for the link.
May 02
Internet Search and Information Neighbourhoods
I’ve written and blogged on the idea of information neighbourhoods several times. Here’s the original blog post, for more just type “information neighbourhoods” into the search box in the left margin.
The basic idea is that a collection of information resources should be contextually arranged for easy use (which assumes you know the needs and regular activities of your target user community). Now the problem behind that is that a manually compiled information neighbourhood gets out of date very quickly. So neighbourhoods powered by metadata (tagging, taxonomies and other clustering data) and search (entity extraction, semantic analysis, authority and relevancy ranking) are clearly the way to go.
It looks like search is already moving in that direction, as this interview with search company Kosmix points out. Kosmix uses semantic analysis to cluster webpages in a variety of ways, and has pre-configured information neighbourhoods that essentially assemble links in ways that are very easy to use and navigate – a million times better than either the random assemblies of undifferentiated search links returned by Google, or the overly-constrained old style Yahoo subject navigation.
A good example is the RightHealth website powered by Kosmix. A high level taxonomy organises the topics in accessible ways, and my bet is that there is a more sophisticated ontology feeding the semantic analysis that pulls content into the relevant modules. Take a look.
Apr 17
Of Taxonomies and Taxes, Biscuits and Cakes
Taxonomies and taxes do have a common root – in classical Greek, taxa loosely meant classes or arrangements of things and people, and included the “class” of citizens who paid taxes to the city and participated in the political system. Taxation systems rely heavily on taxonomies (and, it turns out, incredibly detailed scope notes) to be able to determine what should be taxed and what should not be taxed.
Who would have thought, for example, that the classification of a chocolate teacake as a “biscuit” rather than a “cake” would be worth 3.5 million sterling and a fourteen year legal case that ended up in the European Court of Justice? The BBC’s report gives a fascinating insight into the complexities of tax taxonomies (I don’t for a moment want to go there and do taxonomy work with them).
Nicey and Wifey have a much more accessible taxonomy guide to the critical distinctions, which I have modified slightly into something approaching a matrix format. If only the UK tax folks could keep it this simple. (Go visit their http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/biscuits/index.php3 for the clarity of the scope notes!).
Thanks to JIW of Cambridge for both links.
Apr 17
Cross Posting: A Taxonomy Journey at EMC
From Green Chameleon:
From Chuck Hollis, who’s a VP with EMC, this nice story (which is still evolving) about how their internal collaboration communities are grappling with the issues of order versus emergence – to taxonomise or to tag? They started with an emergent approach, but as the volume and messiness grew, thought they could help by putting in a taxonomy.
It’s a good lesson in taxonomy development, you need to either go and investigate the language and content thoroughly if it’s a mature content collection, or let it grow for a while until the patterns of language and organisation emerge, then look for consistent organising principles that will help the communities navigate and exploit the content effectively.
For a short while, Chuck thought that activity-oriented organisation principles might work best for the communities. But in opening it up for discussion, he seems surprised that there is so much argument about how to organise and categorise. Second lesson in taxonomy development – you will NEVER get a consensus. Chuck seems all set to run for the hills at the first sound of gunfire. Wisely he focuses on the problems that need to be solved – newbie orientation, proliferation of communities which produces what I call “jungle fever” (impossible to navigate), different human dispositions towards messiness and order.
A great insight into practical issues surrounding the need for taxonomies.
Apr 15
Social Hierarchies, Taxonomies and Rail Travel
This, I kid you not, is a screenshot from the Amtrak Guest Rewards enrolment page. It’s only a fragment of their anticipated enrolment taxonomy, but it already tells a tale of woe. They have a definite penchant for military and religious clients, with just a hint of aristocracy, welcoming the odd prince and princess. It does seem strange to think of royalty going for rewards programmes but I suppose there are enough hard-up royals out there to warrant it. But we can also see that the taxonomy is woefully incomplete. Princes and Princesses may be welcome, but Barons, Dukes, Lords, Kings and Queens are not, not to mention Sheikhs, Fire Chiefs, Chaplains, Abbots and Abbesses. It would make a great example of how not to do taxonomies:
(a) don’t mix up different taxonomy hierarchies in the same vocabulary, it’s confusing – unless you’re going for a full blown thesaurus
(b) if you start a hierarchy you need to finish it, don’t leave it half-baked or incomplete – it will irritate, frustrate expectations, and in this case exclude important people
(c) don’t make your taxonomy/vocabulary more complicated than it needs to be (Mr Ms Miss works fine for most rewards programmes, honorifics can be additional optional information to be typed not selected)
Hat tip to Michelle Lee for this delightful find.
Apr 11
Taxonomists an Endangered Species
Taxonomists in Australia are rapidly becoming extinct, reports Bob Beeton:
“Today Australia’s taxonomic capacity is in peril. The State of Environment 2001 and 2006 have both pointed this out. The immediate issue is reflected in National Taxonomy Forum Report:
* In 2003 about half of Australia’s taxonomists are aged over 45 years, * One third were over 60, * One third of the workforce is voluntary. * Each year there is an ongoing net loss of expertise”He is of course talking about biological taxonomists and points out the importance of this expertise to be able to track and manage the degradation of the natural environment. Who’s tracking the population of organisational taxonomists, and what would happen if they became extinct?
Apr 08
Taxonomy and Information Architecture
In chapter 9 of my book, I wrote about the importance of taxonomy work being able to support the complementary disciplines of information architecture and records management. Back in March James Kelway wrote an excellent post about a project where the information architecture and the taxonomy were built collaboratively with himself (an information architect) and a taxonomist working closely together. A thumbnail of the process is neatly outlined below, go to the full post to see the detail.
James also has a more recent post detailing the taxonomy maintenance process for a B2B website using a search engine and rules-based classification of content. Worth checking out for a very operational view of how taxonomy maintenance works out.
Apr 06
Politics, Taxonomies and Censorship
Popline is the world’s biggest database on reproductive health, with about a third of a million articles. It’s funded by federal agency USAID, and managed by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. If you do a search in its database today under “abortion” you’ll find over 26,000 articles. Between February and yesterday, you wouldn’t have found any articles. What happened?
Back in February, staff at USAID (which has a reputation for enforcing the conservative anti-abortion views of the Bush administration) contacted Popline administrators to express concern about two (out of 26,000) articles they had found on the database which were about abortion advocacy. Popline reviewed the articles, decided they didn’t fit with the database’s collection policy, and pulled them. Okay, a slightly questionable decision in response to a heavy lean from your purse-holder, but what the hell, it’s only two articles.
Apr 06
Taxonomy Viewer
From the National Institute of Genetics, Japan, comes this stunning taxonomy viewer covering the so called “tree of life” – the taxonomy of known cellular organisms. You can zoom and browse to the node level. While it’s a bit clunky to use, the principle of visually displaying a taxonomy from high level to low level in terms of its actual population of content and not its abstract collection of defined nodes, is a powerful one to be able to show how balanced and hospitable a taxonomy actually is. Is anybody using such a tool to monitor the population of a knowledge taxonomy in organisational use?
Apr 06
Roget, Taxonomies and Lists
I’ve just finished reading Joshua Kendall’s biography of Peter Mark Roget of thesaurus fame: The Man Who Made Lists (Putnam 2008). Although Kendall takes a popularising approach (the book is sadly lacking in bibliography) he has clearly done his homework and has done a great job of situating Roget in the intellectual life of his time, and draws out the role of taxonomy not only in Roget’s life and work, but also in the approach to science, society and industry of that period. For those interested in the history of taxonomy, this is a small but useful contribution. Of particular interest is the way that Roget appeared to use list-making and classification activities as a strategy to cope with stress, anxiety and depression… as a metaphor for the role of taxonomies in sensemaking, it’s a powerful one.
