Taxonomy, Metadata and Search
Book
(The link above will take you to the Straits Knowledge online store)
This widely recognised 2007 book by Patrick Lambe is still the only major text on how taxonomy work integrates with and supports knowledge management.
This book frames the role of taxonomy work inside the larger knowledge management agenda. This is 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.
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, especially in supporting coordination across organisation boundaries.
This book communicates a tricky subject in a clear, accessible style, supported by detailed case studies to support the arguments made. A final chapter looks at where taxonomies sit in relation to folksonomies and ontologies. In this book, taxonomy work finally enters the knowledge management mainstream.
Published in the UK by Elsevier Chandos, Oxford, in 2007.
Articles
Why do many enterprise taxonomy projects fail? In this thought-piece Patrick explains why taxonomy projects are extraordinarily fragile in relation to the quality of the initial evidence gathering stage. He outlines a methodology for improving the robustness and effectiveness of an enterprise taxonomy design, through a systematic knowledge audit at the project’s outset.
Posted on 2 February 2015
How-To Guides
This poster summarises the empirical, evidence based taxonomy development process we recommend.
Posted on 1 May 2012
“Automagicality” has been one of the banes of KM, and specifically within that, understanding the technologies that go into an effective search and discovery experience, and how different technologies can be combined. Here’s an extended piece describing the elements of the search and discovery stack, and how they work individually and in concert, encompassing search, taxonomy management and text analytics for machine aided classification of content.
Posted on 4 January 2017
The challenge in information environments is to get complete, accurate and consistent metadata applied to information and data resources. In this article co-authored with Maish Nichani we share strategies to collect metadata that lower the reliance on people in supplying metadata. We cannot completely remove people from the equation but we can prevent them from doing additional work, and focus the role of people on the value added metadata that machines and environment cannot automatically supply.
Posted on 15 May 2013
Videos
Video presentation by Patrick Lambe of the concept of information neighbourhoods, and the steps involved in designing them. Links to the idea of tasknomies. Filmed at a workshop in December 2007.
In this presentation from Patrick Lambe's book "Organising Knowledge" we look at the role that the tree structure plays in taxonomy design, and the constraints on its use. This is the first of two parts.
Posted on 25 February 2014
In this presentation from Patrick Lambe's new book "Organising Knowledge" we look at the roles that taxonomy forms can play other than the tree structure in taxonomy design, and how folksonomies. This is the second of two parts.
Posted on 25 February 2014
This was a talk for the Information and Knowledge Management Society of Singapore on 30 August 2007. The topic was on the process of taxonomy development, and in part one of the video, Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies introduces his company and two case public sector case studies, one from Singapore and one from the USA.
This was a talk for the Information and Knowledge Management Society of Singapore on 30 August 2007. The topic was on the process of taxonomy development, and in part two of the video, Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies discusses a taxonomy development project for the Singapore Government Metadata Standard (SGMS) project.
This was a talk for the Information and Knowledge Management Society of Singapore on 30 August 2007. The topic was on the process of taxonomy development, and in part three of the video, Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies discusses a taxonomy development project for the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA.
In this video Dave Clarke of Dow Jones describes how tools can be used to manage taxonomies for an iKMS evening talk on 30 August 2007. In part one, Dave focuses on the importance of collaboration between the different stakeholders in managing taxonomies.
In this video Dave Clarke of Dow Jones describes how tools can be used to manage taxonomies for an iKMS evening talk on 30 August 2007. In part two Dave describes how you can use tools to support the taxonomy creation process.
In this video Dave Clarke of Dow Jones describes how tools can be used to manage taxonomies for an iKMS evening talk on 30 August 2007. In part three Dave describes how taxonomy tools can link different enterprise applications, including legacy taxonomies.