taxonomy - Philip Guth on Diigo

02 Feb 09

The simplicity of folders is their strength – but for complex use cases, it
can be their weakness. Imagine you have a category that appears in more than one
place (very common in hierarchies). If you’re using folders, that can’t happen.
You have to choose a position.

02 Dec 08

O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 0596527349 - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition

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jlearning organize categorizing information architecture taxonomy

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. Within a single organization scheme, you will need to
balance the tension between exclusivity and inclusivity. Taxonomies that allow cross-listing are known as polyhierarchical. Ambiguous organization schemes in particular make it
challenging to divide content into mutually exclusive categories. Do tomatoes
belong in the fruit, vegetable, or berry category? In many cases, you might
place the more ambiguous items into two or more categories so that users are
sure to find them. However, if too many items are cross-listed, the hierarchy
loses its value. This tension between exclusivity and inclusivity does not exist
across different organization schemes. You would expect a listing of products
organized by format to include the same items as a companion listing of products
organized by topic. Topic and format are simply two different ways of
looking at the same information. Or to use a technical term, they're two
independent facets.
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.

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jlearning information architecture organize categorizing taxonomy 'controlled vocabulary'

21 Oct 08

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Blooms_rose.svg

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taxonomy jlearning education

20 Oct 08

Organising Knowledge

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taxonomy jlearning knowledge management information architecture vocabulary

Taxonomy Warehouse - Vocabulary Details

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taxonomy vocabulary jlearning standards

19 Oct 08

O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 0596527349 - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition

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jlearning books information architecture taxonomy

Free tagging, also known as collaborative categorization, mob indexing, and ethnoclassification, is a simple yet powerful tool. Users tag objects with one or more keywords. The tags are public and serve as pivots for social navigation. Users can move fluidly between objects, authors, tags, and indexers. And when large numbers of people get involved, interesting opportunities arise to transform user behavior and tagging patterns into new organization and navigation systems.
Exact or "objective" organization schemes divide information into well-defined and mutually exclusive sections. The alphabetical organization of the phone book's white pages is a perfect example. If you know the last name of the person you are looking for, navigating the scheme is easy. "Porter" is in the Ps, which are after the Os but before the Qs. This is called known-item searching. You know what you're looking for, and it's obvious where to find it. No ambiguity is involved. The problem with exact organization schemes is that they require users to know the specific name of the resource they are looking for. The white pages don't work very well if you're looking for a plumber.
29 more annotations...
- We use the concept of an "information ecology"^[4] composed of users, content, and context to address the complex dependencies that exist. And we draw upon our trusty Venn diagram (see Figure 2-2 ) to help people visualize and understand these relationships. The three circles illustrate the interdependent nature of users, content, and context within a complex, adaptive information ecology.
- The foundation of almost all good information architectures is a well-designed hierarchy or taxonomy.
- Believe it or not, we're all becoming librarians. This quiet yet powerful revolution is driven by the decentralizing force of the global Internet. Not long ago, the responsibility for labeling, organizing, and providing access to information fell squarely in the laps of librarians. These librarians spoke in strange languages about Dewey Decimal Classification and the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules. They classified, cataloged, and helped you find the information you needed.
- There are different models of what happens when users look for information. Modeling users' needs and behaviors forces us to ask useful questions about what kind of information the user wants, how much information is enough, and how the user actually interacts with the architecture.
- The main ways of categorizing or grouping a site's content (e.g., by topic, by task, by audiences, or by chronology). Also known as taxonomies and hierarchies. Tag clouds (based on user-generated tags) are also a form of organization system.
- Because hierarchies provide a simple and familiar way to organize information, they are usually a good place to start the information architecture process.
- 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. Within a single organization scheme, you will need to balance the tension between exclusivity and inclusivity.
  Taxonomies that allow cross-listing are known as polyhierarchical.
- For example, when asked what are the most important qualities that an information architect should have, the answer becomes quite simple: some knowledge of users and their needs (which might come from exposure to human–computer interaction and a variety of other fields), content (think technical communication and journalism), and context (read a book on organizational psychology).
- 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. If a hierarchy is too narrow and deep, users have to click through an inordinate number of levels to find what they are looking for.
- Certain types of information lend themselves to chronological organization. For example, an archive of press releases might be organized by the date of release. Press release archives are obvious candidates for chronological organization schemes (see Figure 5-3).
  The date of announcement provides important context for the release. However, keep in mind that users may also want to browse the releases by title, product category, or geography, or to search by keyword. A complementary combination of organization schemes is often necessary. History books, magazine archives, diaries, and television guides tend to be organized chronologically. As long as there is agreement on when a particular event occurred, chronological schemes are easy to design and use.
- Figure 3-2. Four common information needs
- Whether explicit or implicit, each organization has a mission, goals, strategy, staff, processes and procedures, physical and technology infrastructure, budget, and culture
- All web sites and intranets exist within a particular business or organizational context.
- This collective mix of capabilities, aspirations, and resources is unique to each organization.
- First, you need to understand the business context. What makes it unique? Where is the business today and where does it want to be tomorrow? In many cases, you're dealing with tacit knowledge. It's not written down anywhere; it's in people's heads and has never been put into words.
- Classification systems are built upon the foundation of language, and language is ambiguous: words are capable of being understood more than one way. Think about the word pitch. When I say pitch, what do you hear? There are more than 15 definitions, including:
  
  A throw, fling, or toss
  A black, sticky substance used for waterproofing
  The rising and falling of the bow and stern of a ship in a rough sea
  A salesman's persuasive line of talk
  An element of sound determined by the frequency of vibration
- David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, stated:
  Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy outperforms more structured approaches to classification.
- Lou Rosenfeld, Clay Shirky argued:
  The advantage of folksonomies isn't that they're better than controlled vocabularies, it's that they're better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed...This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never understood...the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.
- Other systems take a content component or digital asset approach, leveraging
  some form of structural markup (XML or SGML, for example) to allow management
  and access at a finer level of granularity.
- Politics exist in every organization. Individuals and departments constantly position for influence or respect.
  Because of the inherent power of information organization in forming understanding and opinion, the process of designing information architectures for web sites and intranets can involve a strong undercurrent of politics. The choice of organization and labeling systems can have a big impact on how users of the site perceive the company, its departments, and its products. For example, should we include a link to the library site on the main page of the corporate intranet? Should we call it The Library or Information Services or Knowledge Management? Should information resources provided by other departments be included in this area? If the library gets a link on the main page, why not corporate communications? What about daily news?
- mbiguous or "subjective" organization schemes divide information into categories that defy exact definition. They are mired in the ambiguity of language and organization, not to mention human subjectivity. They are difficult to design and maintain. They can be difficult to use. Remember the tomato? Do we classify it under fruit, berry, or vegetable?
- extensive research shows that library patrons use ambiguous subject-based schemes such as the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems much more frequently.
- Predetermined vocabularies of preferred terms that describe a specific domain (e.g., auto racing or orthopedic surgery); typically include variant terms (e.g., "brewskie" is a variant term for "beer").Thesauri are controlled vocabularies that generally include links to broader and narrower terms, related terms, and descriptions of preferred terms (aka "scope notes"). Search systems can enhance queries by extracting a query's synonyms from a controlled vocabulary.
- 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.
- Task-oriented schemes organize content and applications into a collection of processes, functions, or tasks. These schemes are appropriate when it's possible to anticipate a limited number of high-priority tasks that users will want to perform. Desktop software applications such as word processors and spreadsheets provide familiar examples. Collections of individual actions are organized under task-oriented menus such as Edit, Insert, and Format.
- If your site has to do with education or if your audience is comprised of educators, you might start with ERIC as the source for your site's labels. You can use a thesaurus like ERIC to help you with specific labeling challenges, like determining a better variant for a particularly knotty label. You might go as far as to license the entire vocabulary and use it as your site's labeling system.
- In cases where there are two or more clearly definable audiences for a web site or intranet, an audience-specific organization scheme may make sense. This type of scheme works best when the site is frequented by repeat visitors who can bookmark their particular section of the site. It also works well if there is value in customizing the content for each audience.
- Metaphors are commonly used to help users understand the new by relating it to the familiar. You need not look further than your desktop computer with its folders, files, and trash can or recycle bin for an example.
- There are no standards, but some common variants exist for many navigation system labels. You should consider selecting one from each of these categories and applying it consistently, as these labels are already familiar to most web users. Here is a nonexhaustive list:
  Main, Main Page, Home
  Search, Find, Browse, Search/Browse
  Site Map, Contents, Table of Contents, Index
  Contact, Contact Us
  Help, FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions
  News, News & Events, News & Announcements, Announcements
  About, About Us, About <company name>, Who We Are

14 May 08

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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0596527349 taxonomy

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.
Taxonomies that allow cross-listing are known as polyhierarchical. Ambiguous organization schemes in particular make it challenging to divide content into mutually exclusive categories.
11 more annotations...
- 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.
- 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.
- We use the term information to distinguish information architecture from data and knowledge management.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.

13 May 08

Flickr: Everyday Information Architecture

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taxonomy

Taxonomy Standards

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taxonomy software

12 Feb 08

Digital Web Magazine - Better Living Through Taxonomies

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taxonomy

05 Oct 07

Technorati tags: an introduction - A Consuming Experience

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article blog organize taxonomy

01 Aug 07

Ektron DevCenter, Aniel Sud

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amapaper taxonomy website

There are two basic forms of metadata important to website strategy: descriptive
and structural.
The idea behind a microformat is to supply descriptive metadata without
interfering with the content’s presentation layer or markup.
8 more annotations...
- For example, some data in a CMS can be public and some private
- 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
- A folksonomy is essentially a build-up of free form structural metadata
- Rather than using a vocabulary pre-defined by some system administrator,
  folksonomy is unregulated
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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

Ektron DevCenter, Aniel Sud

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amapaper seo taxonomy webdesign

Swarming tools like StumbleUpon (stumbleupon.com) and Digg (digg.com,)
The primary concern for the white hat SEO is ensuring that important content is
understood by the spider to be important
7 more annotations...
- 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
- Where SEO meets content is in the keyword density
- There is also a threshold above that which indicates keyword spamming, at which
  point a document is ranked lower because of it
- The range a keyword should fall within is no more than 2% to 5% of the total
  number of words on the page
- 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
- 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.
- 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

31 Jul 07

Ektron DevCenter

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amapaper taxonomy

25 Jul 07

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!

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amapaper sabbatical taxonomy

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.
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
9 more annotations...
- 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.
- "SN" stands for "scope note".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0

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amapaper links sabbatical taxonomy

Using Dublin Core

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amapaper sabbatical taxonomy

The wide scale adoption of descriptive standards and practices for electronic
resources will improve retrieval of relevant resources in any venue where
information retrieval is critical.
"The association of standardized descriptive metadata with networked objects
has the potential for substantially improving resource discovery capabilities by
enabling field-based (e.g., author, title) searches, permitting indexing of
non-textual objects, and allowing access to the surrogate content that is
distinct from access to the content of the resource itself." (Weibel and Lagoze,
1997)
2 more annotations...
- The Dublin Core metadata standard is a simple yet effective element set for
  describing a wide range of networked resources. The Dublin Core standard
  includes two levels: Simple and Qualified.
- Another way to look at Dublin Core is as a "small language for making a
  particular class of statements about resources". In this language, there are two
  classes of terms -- elements (nouns) and qualifiers (adjectives) -- which can be
  arranged into a simple pattern of statements.

24 Jul 07

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

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amapaper sabbatical taxonomy teaching

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

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amapaper sabbatical taxonomy

Philip Guth's Library tagged taxonomy → View Popular

The Content Wrangler

O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 0596527349 - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition

O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 0596527349 - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Blooms_rose.svg

Organising Knowledge

Taxonomy Warehouse - Vocabulary Details

O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 0596527349 - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition

Figure 3-2. Four common information needs

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

Flickr: Everyday Information Architecture

Taxonomy Standards

Digital Web Magazine - Better Living Through Taxonomies

Technorati tags: an introduction - A Consuming Experience

Ektron DevCenter, Aniel Sud

Ektron DevCenter, Aniel Sud

Ektron DevCenter

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!

O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0

Using Dublin Core

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

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

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