Sep 26 2007
About me
From October 2009 I have been Taxonomy Manager at the BBC, working on a revision of the classification used in the archive catalogue, after 17 years working in the publishing industry. I am currently working on developing mapping methodologies to create open and flexible online navigation experiences. This blog comprises entirely my own personal opinions, not those of the BBC! I began my career as an editor of reference books and online resources, and went on to manage information architecture and digitisation projects.
I’ve just been awarded a Masters of Research degree at University College London for my study of politics and objectivity in taxonomy work. I am extremely grateful to the wonderful taxonomists and information professionals who so generously helped me with my research as well as all the fantastic academics, staff, and students at UCL. My dissertation proposed the use of a framework based on Helen Longino’s criteria for objectivity in scientific enquiry in order to balance stakeholder/user requirements in taxonomy projects.
Dear Fran,
The Internet has transformed how we communicate with the public, but there are still many challenges in making information easy to find. Since you cover information retrieval in VocabControl, I thought you might be interested in a study that my nonprofit published this summer about how people find information online. The study covers three groups: non-profit organizations and cities; web designers and firms; and the general public.
The study was fascinating on a number of levels, and I invite you to read the executive summary or download a PDF of the findings at http://www.idea.org/find-information.html .
The survey results sparked ideas about tools we could provide that might make finding information online easier. This fall, we will start beta testing a cool new new navigational tool. I don’t have your email, so if you are interested, you can sign up for our beta here: http://www.spicynodes.org/ or to stay abreast of our (very) occasional new projects, you can get our newsletter here: http://www.idea.org/newsletter.html
Thanks,
Michael
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It looks like you are doing some really interesting work!
Dear Fran,
My name is Sepehr and currently I am a student of the Sir John Cass Business School, City University London.
I am doing a research on the use of tagging and folksonomies in a business framework. This is about taking advantages of opportunities in the world of business by the use of folksonomies.
So far, I have come a cross a cirical point that, although this trend is useful, it can not be efiiciently used in a complicated business format.
I was woundering whether you have any thoughts about the use of folksonomies in a more professional matter rather than just using it in on a website to see consumer’s preferences.
Kind Regards.
Sepehr
Hi Sepehr
I presume you have read my short article on the subject:
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/3791
Here’s some other things I like to mention:
I’d also say that the trouble is that folksonomies expand, coalesce and collapse into taxonomies in the end. If they are to be effective – rather than just cheap – they need to do this – and either become self-policing or very frustrating.
Once everything has been tagged with every term associated with every viewpoint, nothing might as well have been tagged at all.
Folksonomies, just as much as taxonomies, represent a process of understanding what everyone else is talking about and negotiating some common ground.They end up giving a single viewpoint – it’s just that it is a viewpoint that is some obscure algorithmic calculation of popularity.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your studies.
All the best
Fran
Hi Fran,
I work at a public radio station in the U.S. We’re looking at changing our current taxonomy for news material from IPTC subject descriptors to something else (not determined yet) as we consider integrating our archive with our web publishing through a digital asset management system. I’d appreciate your thoughts about approaches to this, and if it’s wise to have the web drive our taxonomy standard for our archive. Please feel free to contact me at my email address.
Thanks,
Sylvia