Taxonomy & Tagging
People managing information have been trying to find the ultimate taxonomy for many many years. Various mostly hierarchical structures exist that help us finding our way through libraries, collections of equipment, pharmaceuticals, etc. This is very helpful indeed when managing large collections of information, but usually the creative users considers these taxonomies as a nightmare. And if they can avoid it, they will not do it.I believe (as stated in the previous post) that Search helps us mastering a lot of the information management problems we have today (around finding the information), but I also believe that we need to give Search a helping hand. So how do we do this?
The first thing a corporate tiger can think of is adding more control - i.e. forcing people to use taxonomies, but this will not help a lot. You can of course fix top levels of directory structures and through this enforce some sort of taxonomy, but too much control will frustrate people and have them looking for loop holes.
Therefore we have to trust the user. We have to start relying on their own sense of responsibility. They will tag their documents in their own way. It is not only about trusting the users that they will do it (and in a 'good' way). It is also about trusting that this relative anarchy will give some order at the end of the day.
- About trusting the users: Usually people are not brainless. With other words they will try to do something sensible. Especially if they see that it is easy and that it helps others.
- About trusting it will work: Just look at the whole Web2.0 phenomena, as mentioned a few days ago. We have lots of self-organising sites already today and they work. Why not do this inside companies as well?
You also need to help the users a little, just like in this Blog. If I want to use tags I can see what I have used before. At a company scale it would be even possible to suggest common tags to users (almost like taxonomy), but these tags do not exist because they were invented in an invory tower, but because they were used on a regular basis by others. This is called Folksonomy.Labels: folksonomy, search, tagging, taxonomy, Web2.0
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 5:31 AM
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