VocabControl

Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged. This article on the ReadWrite Web blog is about the new API (does anyone else pronounce this “appy”?) sent out into the world by Reuters. They are hoping it will encourage tagging of articles in a way they can then harvest. It sounds like it is fairly basic at the moment - it is only recognising a few bits and pieces like people and places. It would be interesting to see how well it does with people like Jack London and places like Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa). When I worked on a similar project we had lots of problems disambiguating the Guineas (Papua New, Equatorial, etc) and Salvadors (El or San) in particular. I assume they have lots of authority files backed up by rules that will sort all those out. It would be nice to see “under the bonnet” as it were!

Bibliography by Taxonomy Strategies. A carefully constructed list of useful papers, books, and articles, most available on line, covering taxonomy, information architecture, metadata, knowledge management, etc. This lot will keep me busy over Easter!

The Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy Conference in London on March 10th was a first for event organisers Henry Stewart Events. They were told that the subject was “too niche” , “no-one would turn up”, and “noboby would be interested”. They were not dissuaded, and went ahead with what turned out to be a wonderfully content-rich and fact-dense day. I’ve written a summary of the conference which is available here.

A host of big name speakers (Madi Solomon former Corporate Nomenclature Taxonomist of Walt Disney, Seth Earley of Earley & Associates, John Jordan of Siemens, Chris Sizemore and Silver Oliver from the BBC were just a few) gave fascinating and insightful talks. There were also lots of software overviews which I found very helpful (including an assessment by Theresa Regli from CMS Watch) and as is always a real treat at these events the opportunity to meet lots of other taxonomists and information architects. The food was good too!

Getting Started in Information Architecture for the Web contains some handy tips for novice information architects.

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata is a well-written paper that outlines some key issues in the usefulness and functioning of folksonomies. It includes some interesting ideas about “feedback loops” that motivate social tagging, ideas for further research, and a set of useful links to other articles.

Taxonomy - some guidelines for effective design of taxonomies offers a few basic tips on taxonomy development. There are also links to how the Drupal CMS handles taxonomy.