[Sigia-l] Category label and context

[Ziya Oz]

"Andrew Hinton" wrote:

> the massive ecommerce portal they'd bought from a
> certain European software juggernaut

I love those gazillion dollar installations with the finesse of a Soviet-era
shoe store.

> Each noun or adjective in the name carried great baggage. You'd have thought
> we were trying to index the Talmud or something.

The problem with the Talmud is that it's ink on paper: static. Digital
taxonomies, however, don't have to be.

What users see as categories (if they ever have to) doesn't have to be the
same as what's *related * at the back-end. The 'search' doesn't have to
happen (only) on the actual 'title' of the category. Each category can have
an infinite number of associated properties/attributes, which, in turn, can
be related directly or indirectly to other categories and their
properties/attributes.

So you could search and relate on *multiple* levels simultaneously. That can
enable you to give each (competing) department its own search/relation
'track' so to speak. Same category; different results, depending on who's
doing the search. 

This also makes it infinitely more flexible when returning search results,
since properties/attributes would put everything in context. Indeed, you
could get quite sophisticated by not even returning entries for found
documents, when a narrow result set is not there. You could expose the
relation graph (fruit-audio-coat-computer-etc), ask the user to narrow it
down and only then make the costly trip to the DB/server for the actual doc
records. This is not only technically efficient but may have the added
benefit of not confusing the user with irrelevant stuff.

Once you look at taxonomies not (just) as vertical lists but also as
horizontal and multi-level relation graphs, possibilities open up. Not sure
if a run-of-the-mill CMS can do this, but it's certainly possible.

Best,

Ziya