Taxonomies and TOCs

Tom Johnson boiled down 200+ slides from a Seth Earley workshop on taxonomies to one very readable summary.

“Seth outlined a three-prong approach to information management:

• Develop a taxonomy.

• Apply the taxonomy to your content.

• Leverage the taxonomy to view your content in different ways.”

The workshop fitted in all the parts: taxonomy, folksonomy, inforamtion architecture, metadata, facets. A writer, Johnson noted  the likeness of taxonomy to table of contents:

“That said, although organizing a TOC and building out a taxonomy seem similar, wouldn’t it be much easier to build out the TOC if you already had a taxonomy to refer to? The taxonomy should provide the heavy critical thought already, making the TOC somewhat of a derivative exercise.”

Comments to the post lead to more observations and resources.

Taxonomy, Metadata, and Search: Notes from Seth Earley’s Confab Workshop by Tom Johnson, idratherbewriting.com (June 25)