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.
Oct 10
New Taxonomy Websites
Two recently established taxonomy websites worth tracking and adding to your blog feeds:
Dow Jones Synaptica has been running a team blog called Synaptica Central since August and is building up a nice regular pattern of posts with some good material and resource links – including some very nice posts from Taxonomy Bootcamp.
Mark Schneider has been blogging on Sharepoint implementations and taxonomy since July this year. Given (a) the pervasiveness of Sharepoint and (b) the non-straightforwardness of using taxonomies with Sharepoint, this is a blog to follow!
Oct 09
Taxonomies for Knowledge Management
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. Here’s a fuller write-up from the same authors with some useful narrative around the different stages, as presented at IFLA this year.
The title of the paper is “Taxonomy Development for Knowledge Management” but there’s precious little about KM or KM objectives in the paper. And the approach is a very librarian-ish approach, with a focus on the content and on establishing general rules and principles quite early in the process, which is where I might differ with them in the execution of this process. But the overview and explanation of what’s involved a tricky enterprise is excellent in its clarity.
Thanks to Synaptica Central for this link.
Oct 08
Legal Services Taxonomy Project
“The Gizmos” are the project team for the Legal Services of Northern California who are running a “findability project” using an enterprise wide implementation of Google Search Appliance. They have been writing up their project in a series of posts, most recently on how they went about building a taxonomy and the thinking process behind their decisions – two posts so far on the taxonomy issue, more posts on other wonderful stuff like setting filenaming conventions … (wot, Google? Taxonomy?). This kind of reflective journaling of the experience is very valuable to other implementers. The Gizmos also have some very nice, pragmatic principles it’s worth citing here:
- 1. The directory structures need to be a hierarchical or “top-down” organization of simplified, familiar categories.
- 2. Names for content folders, subfolders or categories need to be consistent with the shared vocabulary of your organization.
- 3. “Lean toward a broad-and-shallow rather than narrow-and-deep hierarchy.”
- 4. It’s not all about taxonomy.
Read the posts here and here for more. And don’t miss part 3 for some hilarious examples of why this is important.
Oct 07
Taxonomies, Navigation and Information Architecture
James Kelway has written a two-parter on how to build and test user centred taxonomies. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.
It’s a good attempt at bringing together IA and taxonomy development approaches, but it needs to be qualified in a couple of ways. First, James is really focusing on building taxonomies for websites, and he doesn’t seem terribly clear on how to link the taxonomy to the business context of the users. He misses the value of conducting and information or knowledge audit as part of the taxonomy input stage. He’s also not clear about the relationship between site navigation and the use of the taxonomy to organise and manage content within the site – spelling this out more clearly would create a lot of value for the many people who get confused about this. James is very good on the different techniques that can be used to start drafting the taxonomy, and I like his use of the “straw taxonomy” idea – “expect the straw taxonomy to get burned” he says, very pragmatically.
Where I would differ with him in the taxonomy development phase is that he seems to think it can be fruitfully achieved by discussing the draft taxonomy with the various stakeholders. In my experience, the more opinions you seek, the less likely you are to get agreement – when it comes to taxonomy categories, you will inevitably get disagreements. People feel honour bound to disagree. By far the best way to validate a draft taxonomy is by continuous cycles of testing using scenarios and card sorting exercises, where you can demonstrate quite precisely the extent to which the taxonomy is – in fact, not opinion – usable.
I found it rather odd that James also suggests using a content categorisation engine to test the robustness of the taxonomy against the content. Such engines are only as good as your understanding of the content translated into interpretation rules for the software to follow – the same understanding that went into the taxonomy design in fact, so this is a quite circular argument.
My small quibbles aside, this is a good start to a long-overdue rapprochement between information architecture and taxonomy work. Let the dialogue continue! Thanks to Maish for alerting me to this.
Sep 29
SMEs and Taxonomy Development
Rebecca Allen has some pragmatic advice about the use of SMEs in taxonomy development. We often assume they are essential, but if you’re focussing on usability for the non-specialist user, you’ll have to moderate their sense of what’s accurate!
Sep 29
Waste Baskets and Taxonomy Testing
Mark Schneider hits the taxonomy purists where they hurt: posting on the advantages of “waste basket taxons” to catch the stuff that doesn’t easily fit into the official taxonomy:
“Taxonomies are a lot easier to manage if they include a “wastebasket taxon” which is a catch-all for things that don’t fit elsewhere. Eventually, if a wastebasket taxon starts to catch a large number of items that fit together, it is time to create a new taxonomy category.”
I’m with him so far. Then he extends the argument to suggest that giving people “mysites” works like giving them the Not Otherwise Classified/Miscellaneous/General basket. I’m not sure it does. If you give people a taxonomy and no waste basket, people will tend to make superficial or distorted decisions for content that doesn’t readily match their understanding of the taxonomy categories. Providing a waste basket alerts you to the taxonomy failures (which can also be a failure of people to understand the nature of the content). Either way you get an alert, and you can start figuring out the implications for your taxonomy or your training and communications, from what’s happening with the waste baskets.
If you just give people their own space to play with their content, and some of that content can be – but doesn’t have to be – contributed to the taxonomy-organised “official” spaces of the company, you don’t have that clear an evaluation decision going on where every piece of content is matched against an official taxonomy and either matched or not matched. You can certainly get evidence you can use for taxonomy management, but you’re not getting the sharp testing of the taxonomy as you are where every piece of content has to be deposited in the taxonomy or in the “I give up” bucket.
Aug 26
Information Sharing Isn’t Data Management
From Dale Meyerrose, US associate director of national intelligence, this clearly stated piece about the importance of an integrated metadata strategy for the enterprise. My only problem is he seems to confuse information sharing with data management. If you keep your eye just on the structured databases, the metadata task is easier, but less effective. And you miss the colouring and insight from more freely constructed information objects.
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…
