Taxonomy Fairy Tales

Patrick Lambe (Straits Knowledge) & Matt Moore (Innotecture) discuss Google, auto-categorization, governance and expertise.

Magic, street-cleaning and know-it-alls appear in these tall(ish) tales.

Straits Knowledge: straitsknowledge.com/​
Innotecture: innotecture.com.au/​

Australian Taxonomy Workshop (3/4 March 2011): innotecture.com.au/​taxonomy/

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• taxonomy
• metadata
• search engines
• google
• auto categorization
• governance
• expertise
• patrick lambe
• matt moore
• straits knowledge
• innotecture

[Backwardsboy]

I would expect the difference of scale to be the main point of difference between intranets and The Internet. When the closed systems that I work with approach one billion information assets and several million users, I'll probably throw out vocabularies and metadata and just install Google search. But that is a long, long way off.

[mattbm34]

@Backwardsboy It's not just a difference of scale, I think. The high density of linking on the web allows Google's PageRank to work. It's also important to remember that Google has a team of hundreds of people tweaking its search algorithm and the web has thousands and thousands of people trying to make web content findable via Google (the SEO industry). And even Google uses faceted search.

[msmimiros]

So true!

Some people seem to beleive that taxomonies (or controlled vocabularies) can be replaced by user-based tagging. What's your opinion on that? Is it just another fairy tale?

[mattbm34]

@msmimiros I think it's a question of both/and rather than either/or. The last chapter of Parick's book discusses the relationship between folksonomies & taxonomies. It depends whether you think that decision-making and governance can be completely crowd-sourced in organizations. I don't think they can.

[mattbm34]

@chriscollison words are working hard for you

[chriscollison]

@mattbm34 gotta be Wordy Rappinghood by the TomTom Club 

[mattbm34]

@chriscollison Which of course begs the question: What were we listening to?

- Everything In Its Right Place?

- Joe Le Taxonomy?

- Standing In The Way of Controlled Vocabulary?

[artschlussel]

Short, sweet, to the point and of course insightful. Good stuff.

[chriscollison]

Nice job guys - enjoyed the format. Impressed with your multitasking capability. Translating taxonomy et al into fairy stories *and* listening to your ipods simultaneously - wow! ;-)