Testing taxonomies
- Article 18 of 26
- M-iD, May 2005
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With a taxonomy in place, a process needs to be developed for maintaining the taxonomy and ensuring it remains current. Maintenance can be manual, with key people in the organisation suggesting changes, which are then approved by someone responsible for maintaining the taxonomy.
'Prompted maintenance' uses technology to re-cluster documents and see how the general nature of the content changes over time. This information can then be reviewed by the person maintaining the taxonomy and incorporated where appropriate. Richard Roth, chief research officer of The Hackett Group, which develops a taxonomy used by companies such as networking giant Cisco Systems for corporate performance monitoring, says that most organisations come back for updates every two or three years.
When they do, they make suggestions as to how the taxonomy should be changed. Hackett keeps a record of those recommendations and reviews them after a year. When they make suggestions for new nodes, Roth says, the group will gather 15 to 20 company executives and work out with them what processes need to be in the node, as well as their activities and sub-processes.
Specialist taxonomy maintenance software can be helpful when making the changes to the taxonomy. "Specialist software really changes the lives of people doing this," says Factiva's Alderman. But if the taxonomy will only change slightly over time, no specialist software is necessary.
Implementing a taxonomy is an activity best suited to information specialists. By using their expertise and the investment already made by organisations in industry taxonomies, development can often be made cheaper and easier. The rewards of implementation will be much greater as a result.
Tying the knot
Kent Connects has deployed a taxonomy to tie together the web sites of many disparate public sector bodies in Kent.
Kent Connects is a partnership of Kent's local authorities and emergency services, but its fragmented nature meant that Kent residents would visit many different members' web sites looking for information on services.
However, they would often visit the wrong site, expecting, for instance, to find out about education at their local council's site when it was the county council that provided the service. As a result, residents were not able to get the information they wanted.
In response, Kent Connects decided to implement a portal that would aggregate the information contained on the individual web sites in an attempt to make it easier for Kent residents to access the information.
But it soon became clear that this was almost impossible: each of the sites used different content management systems - if they used any at all - and few used any metadata to mark up their content. Where they had, they had used incompatible systems. The partners concluded that to provide a consistent and thorough search experience for its residents, they would need to tag all content according to a standard metadata framework and implement a taxonomy that they could apply to both existing and new documents.
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