Are Taxonomies Dead?

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Playing with Taxonomies

Playing with Taxonomies 12/19/2004 03:25 PM
Playing with Taxonomies
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader .aspx?ArticleID=7357&CategoryID=21

Taxonomies are critical to good information systems. But can non-librarians develop effective taxonomies? Several Web sites now being built use socially developed taxonomies. Del.icio.us and Flickr both attract large groups of people describing their content in a way that they all can share. Del.icio.us lets participants share Web bookmarks; Flickr offers online photo sharing. Finding information on either site demands some agreed-upon, dynamic way of classifying content, and changing that classification as the content grows exponentially. Feedback is immediate; you see whether others agree (use) or disagree (don't use) your tags. Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp, developer of Flickr, thinks this user-driven approach has advantages. "If you can hire enough excellent librarians, you will get better keyword results than with social approaches. However, as the content grows, tagging (and retagging) becomes an order of magnitude more difficult. In other words, social approaches are 80% as good as and 10 times easier than top-down approaches." Would Flickr's approach work in the buttoned-down corporate world? Butterfield says, "Anticipate resistance in the CIO crowd who don't want to risk losing control in a social self-correcting process and do not want anything to get lost."

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.

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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
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Dead, Dead, Dead. Someday Soon We'll All
Be Dead.

Dead, Dead, Dead. Someday Soon We'll All
Be Dead. 12/02/2003 10:13 PM
I had a 120gig SATA Hard drive in my G5. It died. Dead blocks all over. My last full backup...

""Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f
-- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So
thank you for your thoughts, but he's f
-- ing dead.''"

""Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f
-- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So
thank you for your thoughts, but he's f
-- ing dead.''" 05/05/2004 09:39 AM

Dead pixels instead of dead trees

Dead pixels instead of dead trees 12/22/2004 01:49 AM

I love books, I love browsing stacks, I love libraries, I love Powell's in Portland, I like collecting books, I always have a stack nearby to read, I love looking through picture books, and I love books even though I didn't really become much of a reader until the end of my college years (I never read for fun until then). Plunging into the Internet fed my book addiction further, as I had to read dozens of computer classics to get up to speed and stay ahead of the curve. Every computer desk I've had until recently was flanked by bookshelves loaded with titles.

Earlier this year, I remember hearing Cory Doctorow give a talk about how ebooks were going to rule the world and folks would abandon the printed page for the laptop screen. I thought it was a good talk, but I felt the thesis was a bit ahead of its time. There's really no comparison between curling up with a book and a blanket in front of a fireplace, versus trying to read thousands of words on a screen.

Last weekend I was doing some house cleaning and I kept finding stacks of books. A stack next to the reading chairs. A stack on the coffee table. A stack beside my bed. All these stacks contained books I bought in 2004, but never read. Some, I got halfway through, but even more I got maybe ten pages in. A few I never even cracked open.

When I think back to the last three books I enjoyed, they were all heard on my iPod, while on a road trip. I can't recall the last book I finished in my hands.

I'm going to take a holiday trip soon to a fairly remote location where there's not much to do besides read. I'm going to sit and read the only book I've wanted to read this year, and I have a feeling it might just be one of the last dead tree books I read for a long time.

As much as I didn't agree with Cory back during his E-tech talk, I'm finally realizing it's coming true in my own life. I read thousands of words everyday on my monitors and I rarely take time to read anything on the printed page, and there's no sign of reversal on that trend. The scariest thing for the bookfan inside me is that I don't think it's bad thing, either.

Long live the ebook. Long live the audiobook. So long, dead trees.

Dead Like Me - Dead or Alive?

Dead Like Me - Dead or Alive? 02/01/2005 09:59 PM
In television these days, there is hardly a show that doesn’t have the blood flowing or the boobies showing. It is hard to find a show that makes it on wit alone. Till a few weeks ago, I thought I had found the saving grace with Showtime’s original show, Dead Like Me. I guess a few executives didn’t share my opinion. The fight is far from over though. In the past shows would have died…

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Not Dead.

Not Dead. 04/19/2004 01:33 AM
I'd better leave this on here for the night so I don't wake up to a deluge of email tomorrow morning. The Zen Garden has been down all day, as has been well reported by now. A whois comes...

DOS -- not dead yet

DOS -- not dead yet 12/05/2003 03:21 AM
DOS -- that's a word you may not have heard in a while. After all, Microsoft proudly claimed "DOS is dead" when it released Windows XP. DOS is a stable and well-known operating system, but the same can be said for Linux, and some might argue that even Windows XP has become stable. So why would you run DOS when you have these newer, better operating systems?

dead, dead, dead

dead, dead, dead 12/03/2003 06:09 PM

Wow, they really did kill MP3.com. So much of the net's history gone in a flash, I do hope they create some mechanism (that isn't laden with DRM) to bring back music hosting or anyone that can record a song at home on their PC.

I bet GarageBand.com takes off in the absence of MP3.com, they were like a better version, though they require users and musicians to actively participate for it to work.

Ten gig FC is all but dead

Ten gig FC is all but dead 04/02/2005 07:23 AM
TechWorld Apr 2 2005 11:18AM GMT

The PC Is Not Dead

The PC Is Not Dead 03/22/2005 03:39 PM

WAP Is Dead?

WAP Is Dead? 08/10/2004 07:27 PM
The Feature Aug 10 2004 11:14PM GMT

The pop-up ad is dead (nearly)

The pop-up ad is dead (nearly) 02/18/2004 05:55 AM
Europe in brief

Yes, It's Still Dead

Yes, It's Still Dead 09/06/2004 11:22 PM
6 long years after the introduction of the bondi-blue iMac, reporters are still writing about the death of floppy disk.
Well, at least it's still better read than the upcoming death of Apple Computer, Inc.

Is the PDA dead?

Is the PDA dead? 06/02/2004 07:51 PM

She's dead, Jim.

She's dead, Jim. 03/31/2005 12:11 PM
Terry Schiavo has died.

Dawn of the dead?

Dawn of the dead? 08/31/2004 01:55 PM
David Pescovitz: A fertility scientist at the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Panayiotis Zavo, claims to have taken cells from dead humans and cloned them. He stopped short of implanting the embryos, but the scientific community is in an uproar. According to New Scientist, one of three cases used DNA from a young girl killed in an automobile wreck. Apparently her parents kept the tissue in the refrigerator for a few days until sending them along to the maverick scientist.

“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.

Zavos's claims have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Link

One-Third of the Dead Said to Be
Children

One-Third of the Dead Said to Be
Children 12/27/2004 11:15 PM
Survivors arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart.

Dead Bug Funeral Kit

Dead Bug Funeral Kit 11/17/2003 07:47 PM
From David Barringer's site: The Dead Bug Funeral Kit comes with an Illustrated Buggy Book of Eulogies with Ribbon Bookmark, Casket, Grave Marker, White Clay Flower, Burial Scroll, and Pouch of Grass Seed. "We are deeply saddened by your loss. We hope the Dead Bug Kit will honor your bug." Link (Thanks, Invi sible Cowgirl!)

Useful Dead Technologies

Useful Dead Technologies 02/01/2005 09:18 PM
As time progresses, we expect technology to progress as well. It doesn't always do so. Whether from corporate greed or corporate stupidity or just plain evil orneryness, some very good technologies have been allowed to die, usually being replaced by something vastly inferior and sometimes not being replaced at all. Listed here are some technologies that were very useful, but have become not more useful but less; or died off completely. These are good and useful technologies that have been superceded by less useful and usually very annoying technologies.

dead but lifelike

dead but lifelike 09/17/2004 12:57 AM
JAMES LILEKS: .. Lileks

lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0904/091604.html
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The Pope is dead

The Pope is dead 04/02/2005 04:03 PM
Its official, Pope John Paul II has died at age 84 in Vatican City. "The Holy Father died this evening at 21.37 in his private apartment"

"Libeling A Dead Man"

"Libeling A Dead Man" 02/13/2004 02:37 PM

Is Linking Dead?

Is Linking Dead? 08/10/2004 10:48 AM
Simple question - complex answer.

A Third of the Dead Are Said to Be
Children

A Third of the Dead Are Said to Be
Children 12/28/2004 03:02 AM
Survivors arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart.

WAP technology is not dead

WAP technology is not dead 09/10/2004 03:49 AM
Mad.co.uk Sep 10 2004 7:52AM GMT

The Danger of the Dead

The Danger of the Dead 08/02/2004 04:36 AM
Across the country, coroners and health officials are figuring out how to dispose of hundreds or thousands of infectious corpses in case of a terrorist attack. By Randy Dotinga.

NYC to GOP: Drop Dead

NYC to GOP: Drop Dead 08/19/2004 05:55 AM
COLUMNIST WARNS: BAD TIMES AHEAD FOR GOP CONVENTIONEERS IN NYC

commondreams.org/views04/0818-11.htm
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Sun: UltraSPARC Not Dead Yet

Sun: UltraSPARC Not Dead Yet 04/15/2004 12:55 PM
Sun's top microprocessor executive now says the UltraSPARC V may come to market after all, following the recent refocusing of the company's roadmap.

The fax machine: not dead yet

The fax machine: not dead yet 12/31/2003 01:10 PM
BBC News article about the lowly fax machine and how it hangs on in the face of email, text messaging, and the everything else that...

The Floppy is Dead

The Floppy is Dead 09/07/2004 09:48 PM

CNN is proclaiming the death of the floppy drive. If you ask me the floppy has been dead for some time now. Once it became easy to email attachments I all but forgot they even existed. I think the deciding factor for most people was probably the widespread use of USB drives and CDRs. Let's not forget the grief that Apple received for being the first company smart enough to eliminate the floppy drive when the iMac was introduced five years ago.

So what's next? What time tested piece of PC hardware is the next to go?

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Are Bookmarks Dead?

Are Bookmarks Dead? 01/25/2004 09:24 AM

What's Next: Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites: There is a $378,000 study underway to figure out why no one uses heir bookmarks.

...bookmark lists have become "information closets" that hold a jumble of sites people never return to. Only hyperorganized users sort sites into folders, clean out dead links or click on inscrutable addresses to figure out why they were bookmarked in the first place

And, not to beat a dead horse or anything, Microsoft is again going to rei nforce my point that taxonomies just may be dead and you really just need good search.

...a senior researcher with Microsoft who is also part of the University of Washington team, has helped develop a program called Stuff I've Seen. The software is designed to help people recall documents like e-mail messages and Web sites through a unified search interface. Keyword search results include related Web sites already visited, regardless of whether they have been bookmarked.

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"I already feel I'm dead"

"I already feel I'm dead" 09/15/2004 11:55 AM
Is Iraq descending into civil war? As the seemingly indiscriminate violence spreads, many are worried that it is.
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Cognatrix 1.0

Cognatrix 1.0 04/05/2005 11:43 PM
Used for creating and maintaining monolingual thesauri, dictionaries, taxonomies and similar information structures.

Are Taxonomies Dead?

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