taxonomy - Philip Guth on Diigo

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O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 0596527349 - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

We use the term information to distinguish information architecture from data and knowledge management.

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Metadata is the primary key that links information architecture to the design of database schema. It allows us to apply the structure and power of relational databases to the heterogeneous, unstructured environments of web sites and intranets. By tagging documents and other information objects with controlled vocabulary metadata, we enable powerful searching, browsing, filtering, and dynamic linking.
Most of the heavy-duty databases we use are built upon the relational database model. In relational database structures, data is stored within a set of relations or tables. Rows in the tables represent records, and columns represent fields. Data in different tables may be linked through a series of keys.
There is general consensus that the number of links you can safely include is constrained by users' abilities to visually scan the page rather than by their short-term memories.
Second, it is important to consider the balance between breadth and depth in your taxonomy. Breadth refers to the number of options at each level of the hierarchy. Depth refers to the number of levels in the hierarchy.
Taxonomies that allow cross-listing are known as polyhierarchical. Ambiguous organization schemes in particular make it challenging to divide content into mutually exclusive categories.
When designing taxonomies on the Web, you should remember a few rules of thumb. First, you should be aware of, but not bound by, the idea that hierarchical categories should be mutually exclusive.
For a fascinating study on the idiosyncratic methods people use to organize their physical desktops and office spaces, see "How Do People Organize Their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems" by T.W. Malone, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1 (1983).
This study finds that the world produces between one and two exabytes of unique information per year. Given that an exabyte is a billion gigabytes (we're talking 18 zeros), this growing mountain of information should keep us all busy for a while.
But the practice of information architecture will never be reduced to numbers; there's too much ambiguity and complexity. Information architects must rely on experience, intuition, and creativity. We must be willing to take risks and trust our intuition. This is the "art" of information architecture.
An information architecture must balance the needs of users with the goals of the business. Efficient content management and clear policies and procedures are essential.
Structuring involves determining the appropriate levels of granularity^[2] for the information "atoms" in your site, and deciding how to relate them to one another. Organizing involves grouping those components into meaningful and distinctive categories. Labeling means figuring out what to call those categories and the series of navigation links that lead to them.
Data is facts and figures. Relational databases are highly structured and produce specific answers to specific questions. Knowledge is the stuff in people's heads. Knowledge managers develop tools, processes, and incentives to encourage people to share that stuff. Information exists in the messy middle.
We use the term information to distinguish information architecture from data and knowledge management.

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Ektron DevCenter, Aniel Sud

Tags: amapaper, taxonomy, website on 2007-08-01 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The idea behind a microformat is to supply descriptive metadata without
interfering with the content’s presentation layer or markup.
There are two basic forms of metadata important to website strategy: descriptive
and structural.
While structural metadata is not a suitable replacement for traditional search
using indexing, coupling traditional search with structural tools, such as
taxonomy, can significantly ease the difficulty of finding and maintaining a
website’s data
Tag clustering^[3] helps overcome this weakness. The concept behind
tag clustering is that by analyzing the tags related to a piece of content, one
can discern how closely the tags themselves are related
Content may no longer be returned in any meaningful query, and there is little
to no inherent knowledge in the system about relationships between tags.
When a user tags a piece of content, he creates a category that contains a
pointer to that data. Other users may also tag their data with the same
category, and all those items become searchable within that category
Rather than using a vocabulary pre-defined by some system administrator,
folksonomy is unregulated
A folksonomy is essentially a build-up of free form structural metadata
A single piece of content can exist in multiple locations on the taxonomy tree,
and data object hierarchies can be completely unrelated to each other
For example, some data in a CMS can be public and some private

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Ektron DevCenter, Aniel Sud

Tags: amapaper, seo, taxonomy, webdesign on 2007-08-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The most important thing you can do on your site is to put the user first and
make sure your content is properly targeted at them
If the traffic to a site remains static, but the conversion rate doubles, that
is a better result than a doubling in traffic, but a reduced conversion rate.
So, for example, if a single page has 1,000 words on it, a specific keyword
should appear no more than 20 to 50 times
The range a keyword should fall within is no more than 2% to 5% of the total
number of words on the page
There is also a threshold above that which indicates keyword spamming, at which
point a document is ranked lower because of it
Where SEO meets content is in the keyword density
This is achieved through the use of semantic markup. For instance, content in
header tags is understood by the spider to be more important than content in
paragraph tags
The primary concern for the white hat SEO is ensuring that important content is
understood by the spider to be important
Swarming tools like StumbleUpon (stumbleupon.com) and Digg (digg.com,)

Ektron DevCenter

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Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!

Tags: amapaper, sabbatical, taxonomy on 2007-07-25 and saved by27 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Note that the taxonomy helps users by describing the subjects; from the
point of view of metadata there is really no difference between a simple
controlled vocabulary and a taxonomy
The metadata only relates objects to subjects, whereas here we have arranged the
subjects in a hierarchy. So a taxonomy describes the subjects being used for
classification, but is not itself metadata; it can be used in metadata, however.
The diagram below illustrates this.
In this paper we will use taxonomy to mean a subject-based
classification that arranges the terms in the controlled vocabulary into a
hierarchy without doing anything further, though in real life you will find the
term "taxonomy" applied to more complex structures as well.
Thus, we can create a topic type for objects ("document", perhaps), and express
the metadata using names, occurrences, and associations. The topic types let us
keep track of what is a document and what is a concept, but we no longer need
different technologies for metadata and classification.
Topic maps effectively unify these two approaches. Topic maps are organized
around topics, which represent subjects. That is, in a topic map you find
topics. Every topic you find represents a subject out in the real world that it
is a symbol or stand-in for in the topic map. The definition of subject is
essentially "anything whatsoever". What this means is that from the point of
view of a topic map, objects are just a special kind of subject.
The central message of this paper so far has been that metadata is statements
about objects (for example, documents) while thesauri and similar techniques
provide statements about subjects used in classification.
Ontologies represent the culmination of this progression, in the sense that all
of the above are fixed-vocabulary languages for subject description, while
ontologies have open vocabularies.
There exists an XML interchange syntax for faceted classification, known as XFML
(eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language), which was inspired by XTM, and has
some features in common with it.
It should be noted that there exists a generalized view of faceted
classification wherein each facet is generalized to the point where it becomes a
general property, and where the notion of a document is generalized to mean any
kind of object. In this view of faceted classification there is little
difference between faceted classification and ontologies as they are described
below.
This would mean that we recognize the term "topic navigation maps", but that
"topic maps" means the same thing, and we encourage the use of "topic maps"
instead.If we do this we would also have a "UF" property on "topic maps"
referring to "topic navigation maps", since this is implied by the "USE"
relationship.
"SN" stands for "scope note".

O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0

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Using Dublin Core

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A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and assessing - Google Search

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bloom's taxonomy of learning domains - bloom's learning model, for teaching, lesson plans, training cousres design planning and evaluation

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blink design library

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Sci-Tech Today | New Facebook Platform a MySpace Killer?

Tags: admissions, taxonomy, web2.0, website on 2007-05-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

Tags: taxonomy on 2007-05-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

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it’s an easy and logical choice that allows you to manage security in the
content management application at the department level, but it doesn’t
accurately reflect the organization of your internet site.
Parts of the site may only be sparsely populated. It may not be readily obvious
that you are creating gaps (with little or no content) in your site.
You no longer need to reorganize your content management application to change
the delivery application. Just the algorithms (mappings) change.
There may be more than one way to organize content (think: content reuse). Given
the same set of content, same set of classification criteria, but multiple
algorithms, we can now build a delivery framework that allows for many methods
of organization.
By some rule or algorithm, leveraging your content classification data, material
gets “mapped” to the presentation framework
A more robust, albeit more complex, method of managing content is to maintain
structures and metadata in the content management application that is
independent of the delivery system’s organization (navigation).
While much metadata is flat or one-dimensional in nature (e.g., size or weight),
some of it is hierarchical (e.g., taxonomies), making the definition and
distinction between metadata and taxonomy vague and fuzzy.
Historically used by biologists to classify plants or animals according to a set
of natural relationships, in content management and information architecture, we
tend to leverage taxonomies as a tool for organizing content
Specifically, taxonomy is a hierarchical structure for the classification or
organization of data