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Taxonomy– still relevant?

By Hanns Kohler-Kruner posted 05-03-2010 13:06

  

Initially I had thought to write about Processes and current practises but during a recent discussion with a client which consisted of a mixture of community managers and Taxonomists I noticed a lot of underlying hostility between the 2 groups. The taxonomists were trying to get everything inside of their branches of their taxonomies and get the structure they would need for Findability and Management , while the community managers were worried about losing the freedom for freeform contributions within their different areas.

I find that discussion both fascinating and often tinged by more than a little territoriality as well as some preconceived ideas about what should and should not be done within an Enterprise 2.0 regime.

The challenge is really a simple one that affects all organizations trying to grow or move  from a more or less stringent regime of controlled vocabularies and predefined metadata to a more open and collaborative environment, including Social Tagging. This new way of working you can see in many different internet platforms like Flickr, Delicious, Diigo and many others. Of course Social Tagging implies the freedom of users to use whatever terms come most naturally when adding information to objects. Objects being any piece of content that can be added to, so not necessarily just a document.

A taxonomy, on the other hand, is defined  as the art and science of classifying information. It often finds itself in a more or less hierarchic and predefined structure. Whether it is a single tree or multiple trees, linked across by shared vocabularies or thesauri, they are still more or less fixed in their structure.

These two different approaches seem to be diametrically opposed if you first look at them.  Are they really? Yes, I think there is no question about that. They are very much different.

Is there however a way to leverage the control of one (Taxonomy) while allowing for the freedom of the other (Social Tagging)? How to bring them together?

The answer in theory seems to be a fairly straightforward. It does of course depend a lot on the kind of taxonomy that is being used. Patrick Lambe in his book “Organizing Knowledge  lists a total of 7 different kinds of taxonomies, from simple lists to complex system maps. The most common ones will probably be faceted or hierarchical taxonomies. A Taxonomy based on  functional rather than organizational principles should reasonably easily capture the main information necessary for the basic management of the objects. These can and should be automated where ever possible. The second part of the process is the Social Tagging which will then allow a user to generate the social tags that they would like to use for the objects. Yes, it does mean giving up some control to the users, but as the examples on the Internet have shown, over time, the wisdom of the crowds is not as bad as it sounds.

The final step is of course bringing the 2 different approaches together. A well-defined Taxonomy often includes a controlled vocabulary. Common sense would dictate that this is used and checked against the social tags, growing one from the ranks of the other. For this particular customer we used the combination of both to allow for freedom in one place while maintaining control in the other. This made both groups happy within their areas of expertise. Time will tell how much effort is involved in the long term and what the final outcome of this is.

During the project we drew up a list of some of the things we needed to be aware of through the process, as well as before and afterwards.

PRO:

  • Combined approach keeps both groups of stakeholders happy
  • Leveraging existing structures and user experience to grow current vocabularies in use.
  • More current vocabulary
  • Improved Findability by used accepted terms

CONTRA:

  • More work needed on  Governance,
  • More work on maintaining Controlled Vocabularies,
  • More work needed on Thesauri and other structures.

CONCLUSIONS:

  • Deal with ALL Stakeholders seriously
  • Limit initial discussions to manageable chunks
  • Make sure the governance is in place before starting on any implementation
  • Create structures for leveraging improvements over time

And a final word: Social Tagging is something that is widely used on the Web and it adds real value to many interface between users and content. It is sometimes said that you need masses of people to make it work. I don’t agree. I think that we are not leveraging this combined approach enough. My suggestion? Look where this would make sense and is possible within your organization and then give it a serious go, you will be surprised by the quality of results ! I know my client was !

What are your experiences ? Tried this before? I look forwards to hearing from you or reading from you on the discussion forums !



#classification #Taxonomy #TaxonomyandMetadata #findability #socialtagging
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