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.
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