Forest for the Trees: How Taxonomy Design Is Like Systems Engineering

You need to consider systems engineering when the interrelationships between systems are as complicated as the systems themselves. For example, to reduce automotive traffic you need to research social behavior, road design, business, and the environment. Taxonomy starts this way, too. Or at least it should.

The Popularity Contest: Taxonomy Development in the Petabyte Era

Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” (1)

Recently Chris Anderson wrote an article for Wired magazine called the The End of Theory. The [...]

Subject Matter Experts and Taxonomy Development

I was recently in a meeting where it was said that a lack of subject matter expertise is a disadvantage in taxonomy development. This is understandable; it makes sense to assume that the more domain expertise a taxonomist has, the better the final information product will be. However, my experience has shown that this is [...]

Cleaning up the Other Bucket

The Other category: also known as General, Miscellaneous, My Stuff, or, too often, the shared drive.
The Other category is the junk drawer for all those taxonomy terms that just don’t seem to fit anywhere else. Reaching into it is taking a chance as you never know what you may find—the yo-yo you can’t seem to [...]