TaxoTips - Helping you classify your content: An good site devoted to helping you figure out where to put…stuff. We’ve discussed taxonomies before they were called tagging (which are really the same thing anyway) — they’re a parent-child classification scheme, in the most simple sense.
This site has a great resources section with a list of books about taxonomic classification, most of which I’ve never seen before. In there, however, is “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” which is an absolute classic. Good to see that it’s held in such high regard.
Two of the guys behind the site run a company actually called Taxonomy Strategies.
Taxonomy Strategies LLC is an information management consultancy that specializes in applying taxonomies, metadata, automatic classification, and other information retrieval technologies to the needs of business.
That’d be a wicked cool job, which makes me a huge dork, but I don’t care. In fact, it could make me rich. Apparently, if you don’t know how to classify all the stuff in your organization, there are companies that will come in and do it for you. Here’s one, for example:
Factiva Taxonomy Services manages one of the largest dedicated global taxonomy resource teams, providing editorial expertise across multiple industry sectors. Our mission is to help you to build and harness the power of controlled vocabulary thesauri, taxonomies and indexes to produce state-of-the-art information retrieval systems and products.
I shudder to contemplate the consulting fees that go along with something like that.
I wonder how long before the whole tagging phenomenon jumps the shark? I like it and everything, but have a sneaking suspicion that we're going to come full circle back to taxonomies. We've talked about taxonomies before — these are the big parent-child tree structures that have traditionally defined information…
The taxonomy was always supposed to be the be-all and end-all of information architecture. A good, solid category structure was how all the information in an enterprise was supposed to fit together. But they're harder to build than you think. There are shades of gray and complications. You…