James Kelway has written a two-parter on how to build and test user centred taxonomies. It’s a good attempt at bringing together IA and taxonomy development approaches, but it needs to be qualified in a couple of ways. He misses the value of conducting and information or knowledge audit as part of the taxonomy input stage. MORE >>

There are also different degrees of ignorance I think, summed up in the famous Rumsfeld quote - see [link] But I DO like the idea of building a taxonomy of non-existent things… sounds very much like Borges! you create a taxonomy of unsatisfied expectations. Thanks Matt for the reference. Thank you Edgar for your post! RSS2.0 MORE >>

Taxonomies are designed to foreground salient things, and background un-salient things. This error is a good example of why taxonomies in management are so important – it’s not simply a matter of rendering lots of documents searchable. Clark in 1926. It’s also about mapping the world of work to render it manageable. MORE >>

Back in February I posted on a very nice, clear handout for the stages in the taxonomy development process from Boeing Company librarians Kathryn Breininger and Mary Whittaker. The title of the paper is “Taxonomy Development for Knowledge Management&# but there’s precious little about KM or KM objectives in the paper. MORE >>

A nice post from Virginia Henry summarising a talk given by Fran Alexander on the current state of taxonomy work a few days ago. In practice, this means incorporating multiple taxonomies and folksonomies and mapping them to one another, so that everyone can use the taxonomy and the terminology that they prefer. MORE >>