Organising Knowledge was a challenging book to write, because it is the first book I know of on taxonomy development that is explicitly aimed at practising knowledge managers. Much of the really good work out there comes out of library science or information studies referring to a much more generalised setting than those encountered by the knowledge manager – who typically works in organisations that are seeking pragmatic solutions to their information and knowledge needs centering on work-oriented documents, not publications. So there were no real precedents to rely on.
In writing the book, my intention was to frame the role of taxonomy work inside the larger knowledge management agenda. Hence, as far as I know, this is also 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.
As I worked on the book, I also realised increasingly that 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, expecially in supporting coordination across organisation boundaries.
I have tried hard to communicate a tricky subject in a clear, accessible style, and have been fortunate in people’s willingness to contribute detailed case studies to support the arguments I make here. A final chapter looks at where taxonomies sit in relation to folksonomies and ontologies. In this book, I hope, taxonomy work finally enters the knowledge management mainstream. If you buy the book, let me know what you think!
See inside the book:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Defining our terms
Chapter 2: Taxonomies can take many forms
Chapter 3: Taxonomies and infrastructure for organisation effectiveness
Chapter 4: Taxonomies and activities for organisation effectiveness
Chapter 5: Taxonomies and knowledge management
Chapter 6: What do we want our taxonomies to do?
Chapter 7: Preparing for a taxonomy project
Chapter 8: Designing your taxonomy
Chapter 9: Implementing your taxonomy
Chapter 10: The future of taxonomy work
Buy the book at:
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Barnes and Noble
DA Direct Australia (best online price I can find in Oz!)
Visit the publisher’s website (Chandos UK)
RESPONSES AND REVIEWS
Lots have people have reviewed and commented on the book, Here’s my favourite, from Kim Sbarcea: “Patrick has brought sexy back to taxonomies!”
For more reviewers’ comments, you’ll find a compilation here.
Jan 29
Folksonomies and Taxonomies on the Intranet
Thomas vander Wal has a very crisp guest post at Oliver Marks’ blog, discussing how to combine the emergent and “up-to-dateness” properties of folksonomies with the “efficiency and clarity” that a taxonomy provides.
Jan 20
Taxonomies Without Commensurate Knowledge = Mistakes
Here’s a story from Annalee Newitz of the problems that can arise when a taxonomy created for one purpose and one knowledge community, is used by others for new purposes.
“Since the 2001 anthrax scare in the US, the government here has maintained a list of 80 microbes and toxins that are essentially forbidden to researchers. Now scientists say the list is undermining security rather than strengthening it.
The list is called the Select Agents and Toxins List (SATL), and the microbes on the list are chosen without any input from researchers in a process that is far from transparent. In an article published today in Nature Reviews Microbiology, scientists Arturo Casadevall and David Relman say that the list is hobbling research efforts as well as the nation’s biosecurity. They say that items on the list are almost impossible to get for legitimate research. And in fact, many of the substances are needed for research into vaccines which would protect people from the very bio-attacks the government fears.
Moreover, the scientists take issue with the microbes placed on the list, many of which are chosen based on their taxonomic category. Unfortunately, taxonomy doesn’t always work well with microbes, which can have many different strains of varying toxicity and whose so-called species often overlap. So the list both overreaches and underreaches, missing dangerous strains and including harmless ones.”
Jan 04
Towards a Taxonomy of DJ-ing
Pedro Lopes, a musician and engineer in Portugal is grappling with putting together a taxonomy of DJ-ing. From his early thinking, it looks to me like it needs a faceted approach. What do you think?
Dec 28
Timeline of Information Organisation
I’ve just come across this cool timeline by Mike Bergman, done about 18 months ago now. It marks the chronology of information organisation critical innovations from cave paintings to metadata!
Dec 23
Racist Webcams?
Now this isn’t strictly about taxonomies in the sense of vocabularies, but it is about discrimination of salient details. Racism is among the most pernicious applications of classification, and it does not have to be intentional to be racist. Taxonomies are supposed to render salient things visible and subject to control; unsalient things invisible and unrecognised. This video illustrates what happens if you don’t test your technology thoroughly on all the salient details…
Thanks to Norainni Rahman for this!
Dec 18
Google, the Crypto-Taxonomisers
From Fran over at Vocab Control a totally brilliant, thoroughgoing riposte to the foolish, ubiquitous question: “Why do we need a taxonomy? Why don’t we just get Google?”.
Fran steps systematically through the things that Google cannot support well, that taxonomies can do better on (ill-defined searches, disambiguation, “aboutness”, complex queries, comprehensiveness, and more). This piece should be in every taxonomist’s communication armoury.
Fran ends by pointing out that Google itself is using classification and taxonomy work to improve its own performance, and Paul Carpenter over at Bronco has a nice piece unpacking exactly how they are doing that.
Dec 17
Taxonomies in Facilitation
An unusual take on taxonomies from facilitation blogger Mark Fulop a couple of weeks ago. Mark comes at the topic from the perspective of helping a community build knowledge together: “If a facilitator understands the concept of taxonomies s/he can harness both the power of structure and community organization in creating framework for organization of knowledge.” (Mark thinks that the “top down” structured approach is the opposite of the “bottom up” folksonomy approach while I think in practice they work together, but this is a side issue).
Mark goes on to suggest three applications of taxonomy work to facilitating community, from most obvious to least obvious:
- managing shared documents
- helping to map common ground
- (most interestingly) depoliticising language
Read the whole piece to appreciate.
Dec 16
Designing Facets for Navigation
I just got round to reading Stephanie Lemieux’s article on “Designing for Faceted Search” (I had the pleasure of hearing Stephanie speak at Taxonomy Bootcamp last month, though she evidently didn’t enjoy hearing me). It’s geared towards external websites and the examples are geared towards classifying tangibles (eg products), and I’d love to see something more advanced on facet design for the messier, more ambiguous world of knowledge and information assets inside organisations. However, Stephanie’s piece lifts out a few very useful principles, which I paraphrase below:
- Design and prioritise your facets based on use cases (understand how the user approaches the content)
- Facet display is not the same as facet design – you can simplify the navigation/browsing task by using progressive disclosure of facets, or context-sensitive display of facets (ie show the facets only when and where your users need to see them, which is another reason you need to understand your users’ work-world)
- Pragmatism trumps purity – if your scientific principles are going to be compromised by a specific user need, don’t lose sleep over it; the objective is not to be 100% tidy, it’s to be effective.
Dec 15
Taxonomies, Porn and Online Advertising
Categorisation mistakes can be embarrassing. In my book I cite a Walmart case where an auto-classification error made “racist” suggestions to customers (eg a search for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory turned up suggestions for movies with African American themes). (Actually, auto-categorisation software is not so much racist, as insensitive to very human contexts, histories and sensibilities).
Now Singapore’s very own SingTel Digital Media has been caught out inadvertently posting ads for its very respectable InSing portal onto a pornographic website. You have to know Singapore (and the culture of government linked companies like SingTel) to appreciate the furore this aroused here. Now I say, why shouldn’t the propriety of InSing be promoted among the heathen pornographers? And what were those Singaporeans who discovered the ad doing on that site in the first place (the “Disgusted” rapporteur claimed to have received the screenshot in an email from a friend)? And why do Singaporeans call porn “prawn” when posting online?
Turns out that the mistake was a categorisation error. The digital advertising contract was outsourced to .Fox Networks, with strict instructions on the categories of website for the ads to be placed on. .Fox Networks relies on third party providers to supply websites to advertise on, and one of its outsourced providers had apparently misclassified an adult website, leading .Fox to assume that it was worthy of SingTel’s money.
There are a couple of lessons here: (a) you can expect categorisation mistakes when you sub-sub-sub-contract (out-out-out-source) categorisation decisions (your common ground diminishes as you distance yourself from your categorisers); (b) categorisation errors can come back to bite you in the ass in very unexpected ways; (c) online advertising is especially vulnerable because it’s hugely expensive to audit categorisation accuracy – as in the Walmart case, you only discover the error when you create outrage. And that’s too late.
Yesterday’s post about the nasty consequences of misclassifying skate was about the dangers of rendering salient things invisible. The Walmart and InSing stories are also about invisibility: in rendering the categorisation process opaque, either through automation or outsourcing. Managers’ nonchalence about the rigour of their taxonomy regimes is a risky approach to take.
Dec 14
Taxonomies, Invisibility and Management
In Science Daily, a report that a species of skate has been fished to near extinction because of a taxonomic error in the 1920s. Two species of skate were classified into a single species by an influential biologist R.S. Clark in 1926. This act effectively made it impossible to “see” both species as distinct, and so the over-fishing of one of them was simply not tracked. Taxonomies are designed to foreground salient things, and background un-salient things. If you make a mistake, you cannot manage or safeguard the things you render invisible. This error is a good example of why taxonomies in management are so important – it’s not simply a matter of rendering lots of documents searchable. It’s also about mapping the world of work to render it manageable. Next time I get an invite to put together a taxonomy by reviewing a pile of documents over a couple of weeks, I’ll think of the humble – and almost extinct – flapper skate D. intermedia.
