Playing with Taxonomies

Grok Headline matches for Playing with Taxonomies

Are Taxonomies Dead?

Are Taxonomies Dead? 01/09/2004 09:58 PM

The taxonomy was always supposed to be the be-all and end-all of information architecture. A good, solid category structure was how all the information in an enterprise was supposed to fit together.

But they're harder to build than you think. There are shades of gray and complications. You need related categories so people can jump from branch to branch; you can slice information so many different ways; who can agree where something fits, etc. I've tried to build a half-dozen, but I can't point to any major successes.

Is the ideal of taxonomy possible? Or is it just better to invest in a good search engine? Think about it, when you visit a site, do you ever browse a taxonomy, or do you just go right to search? If you're looking for something you've seen on this site, do you wade through the category list, or just hit the search engine?

When was the last time you actually browsed Yahoo! or DMOZ? I know they're there, but I haven't visited them in ages. Last time I did visit, what was the first thing I did? That's right — typed something into the search box.

Search is a lazy man's taxonomy. It's not as organized or structured as a taxonomy, but human beings — imperfect creatures than we are — tend to settle to what's easier. So, as an information architect, do you stand on principle, or do you cater to the lazy way your users are going to look for information?

This comes from my current infatuation with wikis. There is no categorizing of pages in wikis (even after my railin g against all their shortcomings a few months ago), there's just search and linking between pages. But the search is good, and it always seems to work. Same with the search on this site — when I'm looking for a previous post, it just always seems to work, and that search is nothing but a SQL "LIKE" query, the dumbest search of all.

So, are taxonomies an ideal that just don't survive the reality test?

Click here to comment on this entry

Of Taxonomies and Crumbtrails

Of Taxonomies and Crumbtrails 08/15/2004 03:33 PM

I've had an eternal struggle with taxonomies and crumbtrails and I'll share it with you now in the hopes of find some resolution that will let me sleep. (Okay, it's not THAT bad, but I have been tossing this around for days now with no solution.)

A taxonomy is a parent-child classification system. Most every site has one whether it was planned or not. I work for a commercial real estate firm, and we have a simple taxonomy, some of which looks like this:


Home
  Property
    Office
    Industrial
    Land
    Retail
    Investment



For the most part, this works fine. It's simple, and it makes sense.

Taxonomies also lend themselves nicely to crumbtrail navigation. If I'm looking at a property in the Office category, I can get a crumbtrail like this:


Home > Property > Office


However, there are situations that require a piece of property to fit into more than one category. For instance, there are many buildings that can legitimately be used for both office and retail. Therefore, the property ends to appear under both categories because people browsing either would be interested in it. This is no problem, as taxonomies are supposed to be able to do this.

But what about the crumbtrail? If I'm looking at a property that appears in both Office and Retail, which crumbtrail do I get:



Home > Property > Office
Home > Property > Retail


I can think of two things:

Primary and Secondary Classification
Pick one "true" classification for the property. Just make an arbitrary decision if its Office and Retail and classify it as such. Let it appear in the other category as well, but the crumbtrail should reflect its "true" classification.

A couple problems here:

(a) Maybe some legitimately fits equally in two places. Say one side of taxonomy classifies by property type (Office, Retail, etc.) and anothert by size (less than 5,000 sq. ft.; 5,000 - 20,000 sq. ft., more than 20,000 sq. ft.). No matter how hard to you try, any property is going to fit in more than one category.

(b) If someone browses to a category from a "secondary" trail, they're going to be confused because the crumtrail doesn't reflect where they came from. For instance, say I give a building a classification of Office but also let it appear as Retail. If someone browses to the property through the Retail trail, then tries to walk back up the trail, they're going to be sent back to Office, instead of Retail where they came from.

Dynamic Crumbtrails
You can always create the crumbtrail based on the trail the use came from. So if a user browses to our property through the Retail trail, display a trail based on that. If they came from Office, display that crumbtrail.

This seems good, but what if the user didn't browse and was linked directly? Then what do you use?

So, there you have my quandry. If anyone has a resolution or thoughts, let's hear them.

Click here to comment on this entry

Stanford: Taxonomies of Love

Stanford: Taxonomies of Love 04/04/2005 04:45 AM
Ever since my little affair (no link), I have become considerably less interested in relationships. Indeed, I’ve been puzzled at…

Taxonomies Tackle Content Classification

Taxonomies Tackle Content Classification 05/09/2004 07:18 AM
Taxonomies Tackle Content Classification
http://www.transformmag.com/enterprise/showArticle .jhtml?articleID=19200201&pgno=1

Finding the information you need is a daunting challenge that consumes about one-third of the typical workday. There is so much information, so many contexts in which documents may be relevant, and so many different file formats, from Office documents to graphics to PDFs. A single business document may cover hundreds, even thousands of subjects, have many authors, and have been created in different contexts for a variety of audiences. Enterprise content management (ECM) systems try to centralize content and enforce the assignment of metadata to simplify the task of finding information. Although ECM systems can bring order to chaos, you'll get more accurate and efficient information retrieval by planning your classification and taxonomy strategy. Creating a taxonomy is the process of classifying information and the associated metadata that further describes the information according to a logical system. There are several ways to create taxonomies, but most organizations build them manually, buy a pre-existing system or apply automated taxonomy/classification tools to their data. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Whichever you choose, advance planning is critical. Develop an information-management strategy, understand your organization's business needs and know what types of information your users require. After these step are complete, you can move on to creating a taxonomy using one of the approaches discussed above.

Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web
Catalogs

Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web
Catalogs 12/02/2002 07:12 AM

sharing photoshop album taxonomies

sharing photoshop album taxonomies 05/24/2004 03:50 PM
the fascinating thing here is how album uses metatagging instead of folders

Features: Formal Taxonomies for the U.S.
Government

Features: Formal Taxonomies for the U.S.
Government 02/01/2005 08:52 PM
Mike Daconta, Metadata Program Manager at the Department of Homeland Security, introduces the notion of a formal taxonomy in the context of the Federal Enteriprise Architecture's Data Reference Model.

Stanford: Taxonomies of Love (Aaron
Swartz: The Webl0g)

Stanford: Taxonomies of Love (Aaron
Swartz: The Webl0g) 04/17/2005 10:05 PM
Stanford- Taxonomies of Love (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

aaronsw.com/weblog/001661
track this site | 2 links

Playing for keeps

Playing for keeps 12/09/2003 08:25 AM
CNET Dec 9 2003 7:45AM ET

Playing for keeps on the Net

Playing for keeps on the Net 06/04/2004 12:57 AM

They're Not Playing Around

They're Not Playing Around 12/22/2004 01:08 AM
We review the cutthroat business of toys: Does Toys "R" Us stand a chance against industry behemoth Wal-Mart this holiday season?

Playing God just got a little more fun

Playing God just got a little more fun 09/17/2004 08:21 AM
Canadian Press via Canada.com Sep 17 2004 12:53PM GMT

Playing PC on your TV

Playing PC on your TV 04/10/2004 11:22 AM
National Post Apr 10 2004 3:30PM GMT

What's playing now...

What's playing now... 07/28/2004 01:27 PM
Using httpQ with winamp, I now post the current track I'm listening to over on the side bar. It's not...

Playing Net movies on your TV

Playing Net movies on your TV 12/29/2004 07:48 AM
New devices that bridge the online divide are widely available, but getting legal content is still a work in progress.

Playing around with Orkut

Playing around with Orkut 01/26/2004 10:19 AM
shortcomings of Orkut .. Martin Roell .. 3

roell.net/weblog/archiv/2004/01/25/playing_around_with_orkut.shtml
track this site | 5 links

playing with explosives

playing with explosives 01/26/2004 12:08 AM
the best part of chinese new year today was the confetti bazooka

Playing Politics

Playing Politics 06/02/2004 11:07 PM
There are plenty of places to "play politics" online for fun and for money. But now Ubisoft has published "The Political Machine" if you want to actually play a video game based on a Presidential election where you can manage the virtual campaigns of Presidential candidates. Apparently, Ubisoft was going to release the game in 2000, but they thought that election was not going to be very eventful. Or maybe they just couldn't figure out how to involve our judicial system in the game.

Playing ball with the CIA

Playing ball with the CIA 03/22/2005 09:14 PM
Buy yourself a Gulfstream IV jet and maybe you, too, could be a team player in the Bush administration's war on terror.

Playing With Time...

Playing With Time... 05/15/2004 02:23 PM
Playing With Time uses time lapse photography and computer animation to show events that normally happen too fast or too slow for humans to perceive. (via Neat Net Tricks newsletter)

Playing With Time

Playing With Time 05/16/2004 07:45 AM
Films of things slowed down or sped up .. A collection of time-lapse movies .. Kijk dan naar deze filmpjes .. "Playing With Time .. im zeitraffer .. gallery .. TIME .. wow

playingwithtime.org
track this site | 4 links

Playing with MarsEdit

Playing with MarsEdit 02/05/2005 09:11 PM
O’Reilly: Giles Turnbull: Playing with MarsEdit: “I’ve been involved in the launch of a new web project during the last couple of weeks. Since it relied on heavy use of the Movable Type online publishing system, I thought it would be worth trying out one of the desktop weblogging applications that are floating around these days.”

Playing with Fire

Playing with Fire 04/23/2004 01:47 PM
Got Gmail and looking for a compatible browser? Looking for a chat app that will keep you on all your favorite chat networks?

This week we'll look at an app almost as old as OS X, and another relative newcomer. Join me for a fun and flammable Freeloader Friday.

Playing with Gmail

Playing with Gmail 04/16/2004 12:56 AM
I got a chance to play a bit with Gmail today... Holy crap it's fast. I only had a dozen test mails in the system and I already felt like they were getting lost. Or I was getting lost. I think the "just search for stuff" approach will take a lot of getting used to. What's with the top quoting? It doesn't work with Safari. I didn't realize how much I love the "quote selected text when you reply"...

Now you're playing with power.

Now you're playing with power. 03/19/2005 02:56 AM
They're all here. Or most of them. This will make you dust off your NES/Genesis/Turbo GraphX-16... but this time with a pixel-perfect map of every level of your most beloved games. From Amiga to Xbox. Castlevania, Zelda, and Megaman among hundreds of others and links to even more in-depth sites. Warning - some of these maps are EXTREMELY large, like 13000x5000 large. NSFCW (Not safe for child within)

Playing in the same team

Playing in the same team 12/31/2004 06:35 AM
Express Computer India Dec 31 2004 10:52AM GMT

SCO Keeps Playing the Media

SCO Keeps Playing the Media 03/06/2004 01:58 AM
In the dictionary under "weasel" they should put the SCO logo.

Playing With Your Head

Playing With Your Head 06/11/2004 03:43 AM
While it's been suggested before, a bunch of researchers at Washington University have actually developed way to control a video game using brainwaves measured by invasively placing electrodes on a human brain. (This is not to be confused with the EEG electrodes that are placed non-invasively on top of the head.) Four adult epilepsy patients were being studied with these brain implants, and they could fairly accurately control virtual movements just by thinking. Amazingly, this method only takes about an hour to learn how to move things, compared to months of training when they use the method that doesn't involve opening up the skull. While this is certainly a breakthrough for patients with disabilities, far in the future this could be a commonplace human-computer interface.

Playing some GBA cartoons

Playing some GBA cartoons 06/17/2004 06:34 AM
Chicago Tribune Jun 17 2004 10:59AM GMT

Playing for 2nd in New Hampshire

Playing for 2nd in New Hampshire 12/25/2003 07:52 PM
Gephardt goes on that since he ran an ad calling Bush's economic policies a "miserable failure,'' that phrase typed into the Google Internet search engine ...

Playing with my Zaurus

Playing with my Zaurus 11/30/2002 04:36 AM
The whole "Do people really use their PDAs?" thing has me trying to whip my Zaurus into better shape. I...

SCO Playing Name Games

SCO Playing Name Games 07/29/2004 03:24 PM

Playing favorites?

Playing favorites? 07/28/2004 11:41 AM
USA Today Jul 28 2004 3:47PM GMT

Playing with food

Playing with food 04/18/2005 11:49 PM
globetechnology.com Apr 19 2005 4:03AM GMT

Playing around with OneNote

Playing around with OneNote 07/22/2004 04:37 AM

I have been wanting to play around with OneNote for some time and decided to download the fre e 60 day trial. Thus far I am not overly impressed I was expecting significant more features. I am so used to working with OPAL, RSS and XML that I just expect some of that functionality to be built into the application.

I have in my head a dream application that I keep thinking I will dig up someplace and thus far I haven't. I guess I just need a team of programmers and a bunch of money.

Playing the Game Right

Playing the Game Right 05/06/2004 04:14 PM
Video game maker THQ delivers strong results and forecasts a better fiscal 2005.

Playing war with the US army

Playing war with the US army 07/10/2004 03:15 AM
As military-style video games become more lifelike, are they blurring the line between fantasy and reality?

Playing with balls

Playing with balls 07/02/2004 08:15 AM
He plays the piano with his balls (SFW)

Role Playing

Role Playing 03/14/2005 05:35 PM
The boss-man was in the office today, he stopped by my office around 09:30 and asked me to visit his...
Grok Description matches for Playing with Taxonomies
GrokA matches for Playing with Taxonomies

Playing with Taxonomies

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: