There's a bad smell about taxonomies these days...bit like a stuffed animal. No-one wants to call themselves a taxonomist either - hardly surprising. We're all now terminology managers, knowledge managers, information architects...
What's wrong with taxonomy then? well it represents control, hierarchy and the domain of the information expert. Information has been liberated and we think we no longer need librarians or information specialists to help us find our way to the right information.
Is search really that good because I hadn't noticed...there is defnitely a lot of information out there but sometimes I don't trust search engines. I was searching using Autonomy...for some information about the head - as a part of the body and I got content on circumcision. I was searching for 'fit' as in healthy and I got information on the diaphragm.
At the end of the day...my search engine understands that words appear together in certain frequencies and therefore are some how related. But it can never understand how they are related and what that relationship means (or if that content is relevant to my search) - it doesn't really understand what I mean...
Search engines don,t negate the need for taxonomy. But what about social tagging?
Please permit me to put my hands round the neck of the next person who claims that now we have social tagging we dont need taxonomy....they are not polar extremes.
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
Sure everyone is an information specialist these days and how the user understands the value of information and assigns keyword tags to it is extremely valuable to other information users. But with no semantic framework behind it - we're just searching an index of words with no inherent meaning.
Unless I,ve got a lot of time to search or to browse someone elses tag world I,m going to get pretty frustrated.
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