A question had come up in one of my classes on how classification differs from taxonomies/thesauri. As part of an assignment to find thesauri on the web a student sought to find “how the Federal Government classifies its publications and was expecting to find a very elaborate Thesaurus … and…
The Accidental Taxonomist Blog
Testing Taxonomies
As mentioned in my previous blogpost, “Evaluating Taxonomies,” taxonomy evaluation and taxonomy testing differ. While the evaluation of a taxonomy by a taxonomist is needed when a taxonomy is created by non-taxonomists (such as by subject-matter experts instead), testing of a taxonomy, on the other hand, is recommended in all…
Evaluating Taxonomies
In my last blog post, “Taxonomy Management Consulting,” I mentioned that more organizations now have taxonomies, so the need is shifting somewhat from designing and building new taxonomies to managing existing taxonomies. It might not be that simple, however, if the existing taxonomy was created and never used, created for…
Taxonomy Management Consulting
I recently wrote an article on taxonomy management for the online magazine FreePint. By “taxonomy management” I mean taxonomy maintenance, governance, and long-term planning. I’m not going to repeat that article here, because you can look it up. The short version is available without a subscription: “The Care and Feeding…
The Remote Taxonomist
One of the characteristics of taxonomy work is that taxonomists can work remotely from their managers, colleagues, or clients, and many do. It’s not because those attracted to taxonomy work specifically want to work from home. Rather, taxonomy work is a narrow specialty, in which relatively few people are sufficiently…
Taxonomies and Content Management
Taxonomies are relevant to various applications, implementations, software products, disciplines, and industries, whereas taxonomy itself is not really a discipline or industry. This is apparent in how taxonomy shows up as a topic in presentation session in many different conferences. These include conferences and fields of: knowledge management, enterprise search,…
E-Commerce Taxonomies
Happy Cyber-Monday! Coincidentally, this week, which is cyber-week for some retailers, I am giving a conference presentation, at Gilbane in Boston on November 29, on “Taxonomies for E-Commerce.” As online shopping grows, the organization of products for sale on e-commerce websites becomes increasingly important, and there is also more standardization.…
From Taxonomies to Ontologies: Customized and Semantic Relationships
At this year’s Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, I was invited to present on the panel giving 5-minute “Pecha Kucha” lightning talks, for which this year’s theme was ontology. Just as there are different understandings and usages of “taxonomy,” so are there different understandings and usages of “ontology.” You can come…
Taxonomies for Multiple Kinds of Users
This week, I again attended the annual Taxonomy Boot Camp conference held in Washington, DC, the only conference dedicated to taxonomies. The main theme I came away with this year is that taxonomies serve diverse audiences and users. The theme of different users was best exemplified in a session…
Text Analytics and Taxonomies
What does text analytics have to do with taxonomies? Not so much, I had previously assumed, other than serving a similar objective of information retrieval. After all, text analytics is known as a natural language processing technology designed to obtain meaning for text without the traditional process of indexing to a…