Organising Knowledge was a challenging book to write, because it is the first book I know of on taxonomy development that is explicitly aimed at practising knowledge managers. Much of the really good work out there comes out of library science or information studies referring to a much more generalised setting than those encountered by the knowledge manager – who typically works in organisations that are seeking pragmatic solutions to their information and knowledge needs centering on work-oriented documents, not publications. So there were no real precedents to rely on.
In writing the book, my intention was to frame the role of taxonomy work inside the larger knowledge management agenda. Hence, as far as I know, this is also the first taxonomy book that combines a practical guide to taxonomy development with a broader explanation of how taxonomy work contributes to knowledge management in a variety of ways.
As I worked on the book, I also realised increasingly that taxonomy work is not just useful in supporting information retrieval (which is the popular starting point for taxonomy projects), but as a key tool for supporting organisation effectiveness, expecially in supporting coordination across organisation boundaries.
I have tried hard to communicate a tricky subject in a clear, accessible style, and have been fortunate in people’s willingness to contribute detailed case studies to support the arguments I make here. A final chapter looks at where taxonomies sit in relation to folksonomies and ontologies. In this book, I hope, taxonomy work finally enters the knowledge management mainstream. If you buy the book, let me know what you think!
See inside the book:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Defining our terms
Chapter 2: Taxonomies can take many forms
Chapter 3: Taxonomies and infrastructure for organisation effectiveness
Chapter 4: Taxonomies and activities for organisation effectiveness
Chapter 5: Taxonomies and knowledge management
Chapter 6: What do we want our taxonomies to do?
Chapter 7: Preparing for a taxonomy project
Chapter 8: Designing your taxonomy
Chapter 9: Implementing your taxonomy
Chapter 10: The future of taxonomy work
Buy the book at:
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Barnes and Noble
DA Direct Australia (best online price I can find in Oz!)
Visit the publisher’s website (Chandos UK)
RESPONSES AND REVIEWS
Lots have people have reviewed and commented on the book, Here’s my favourite, from Kim Sbarcea: “Patrick has brought sexy back to taxonomies!”
For more reviewers’ comments, you’ll find a compilation here.
Aug 16
Only a Taxonomist…
Jul 24
Taxonomies vs Typologies
John Wilkins has an intriguing (anti-creationist) post explaining the differences between taxonomy and typology in biology. It’s the difference between classifying by identity (homology) vs similarity. The crispness of this distinction doesn’t hold up as well in the social sciences, I think, where types have a different meaning as exemplars of particular combinations of attributes, nor in the world of knowledge classification. The distinction is also not unassailable among scientists either, as John points out. It’s a useful reminder to look hard at the principles by which the classification is done, but also that taxonomy work in biology doesn’t work the same way in the world of information and knowledge.
Jul 16
Before Your Very Eyes
LibraryThing is a blight on the face of the earth if you make a living from proprietary knowledge organisation tools. Because, shock horror dismay, they believe this sort of stuff should be open source. Their latest assault on the Iron Mountain of Knowledge Control is to replace the proprietary and wildly anachronistic Dewey Decimal Classification with an Open Shelves Classification scheme. On this page you’ll see the unfolding dialogue as the contributors build a classification scheme from scratch. Both fascinating and illuminating to watch a universal taxonomy being built collaboratively in real time. Unusually for taxonomy work, no blood has been spilled yet… but it’s early days…
Jul 10
No, No, No
WAND is a US-based taxonomy development company which essentially builds taxonomies and vocabularies for internet applications. If you want to set up an e-commerce site you can get WAND to build a taxonomy for you, or you can buy one.
Now they seem to have decided to get into the enterprise taxonomy act. What’s wrong with the statement in this press release announcing their new taxonomy for enterprise use?
“WAND’s new business vocabulary provides a four-level hierarchy of important business terminology covering human resources, accounting and finance, sales and marketing, legal, and information technology. The vocabulary includes all the core business concepts that any company has to deal with and can be extended and customized to include company specific terminology.”
Urgh. If you’re starting a company from ground up this approach might work. If you are a typical-generic-US company and want to use the WAND taxonomy as a reference taxonomy for building your own, it might work. But installing this and expecting you can let it loose in any corporate environment to deliver its information retrieval needs with just a few minor tweaks? No way. If WAND think this can work for their customers, then they are not as experienced in enterprise taxonomy work as they would like to have you believe. If they know it’s not as easy as the press release makes out then they are clearly in the magic bullet business and not to be trusted.
Jul 03
Taxonomy Cookbook from Dow Jones
Daniela Barbosa , Business Development Manager with Dow Jones Synaptica has just put out a beautifully designed “Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook”. It’s easy on the eye and extremely digestible, and does a good job of explaining a variety of ways that taxonomies and folksonomies can be used to complement each other. At 20 pages it’s hard to be much more than a sales pitch for the folksonomy hybrid approach – ie it’s a little short on the how of implementation. But as a sales pitch for taking folksonomies seriously alongside taxonomies, it’s a great resource. As a fun way of presenting a major new development in taxonomy work, brilliant. (You’ll need to register with Dow Jones to download the ebook).
Jul 03
Entity Extraction
Miles Kehoe has a useful post describing 13 different techniques for extracting meaningful words from documents or content – most usefully in automatic extraction of metadata or search.
Jun 27
Wheel Taxonomies
In my book I have a section about matrix taxonomies and the limitations on how much information they can contain without some clever design. The “verb wheel” below based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives, is one of those clever designs. Designed by Ken Halla and Dan Moirao of California State, it manages to capture three elements in just two dimensions: the hierarchy of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the verbs to express learner cognitive outcomes, and nouns that express possible learner products that would make evidence for those cognitive abilities. Very simple, very neat. Of course, wheel taxonomies are quite ancient, being used in Aztec stone calendars combining astrology with calendars and compasses and totemology, as well as in the I Ching and other zodiacal instruments.
Thanks to Kong Heng Sun for this tip.
Jun 18
Social Networks and Categories
An interesting post from Graham Durant-Law pointing to a republished 1965 article by Harrison White on the ability to discern categories within social networks.
“In this article White introduces the notion of a “catnet”, where he brings together the ideas of categories and networks – hence catnet. The idea at the time was quite novel, yet now it seems obvious – people who are alike in some way will form networks (birds of a feather flock together). White’s contribution was how to represent the various categories that might be found in a network. Further by bringing together network analysis and categories like race, gender, or education, he was able to show that categories are an artificial construct that aid understanding but of themselves are not sufficient.”
Jun 11
Taxonomies in Enterprise Data Management
A brilliant post from Scott Felten about the central role of taxonomy work in enterprise data management and governance. I especially liked this little throwaway remark: ”[Taxonomy work] is not a development phase, don’t sell it to senior management. No one cares about it. It’s an expected minimum of doing business.”
Read the whole thing.
Jun 09
Walk-in Taxonomies
Rex Heer at Iowa State University has been playing with building three dimensional models in Second Life. He’s currently working on two of them: a version of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives, which as you can see from the first snapshot below, is pretty much a matrix taxonomy. There’s little to be gained from the 3D representation that couldn’t be gained from a 2D matrix, except that the idea of hierarchy is communicated in the escalating height of the steps as we move towards metacognitive functions. However, the “at a glance” benefits of the matrix are somewhat lost as you try to position yourself to get the best vantage point. So an interesting experiment, but I’m not sure it works.
Somewhat more promising is Rex’s interpretation of Wenger’s theory of communities of practice (second snapshot) which functions most interestingly as a “walk-through” model. I can see this idea working well for more complex frameworks than tree taxonomies and matrices, especially progressive ones, where you can add artefacts and content to the various domains. This experiment is extremely interesting, and provides a very suggestive echo of the memory palace of antiquity, one of modern taxonomy’s almost-forgotten ur-forms.
Many thanks to Nicole Cargill-Kipar for this link.
