[Sigia-l] Findability

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Gunnar Langemark
|
| [...] But tools for personal search, categorization and "content
| aggregation" are popping up everywhere now, and they will - IMHO -
| drive the development in categorization, taxonomy and personal
| findability.

Well, I do wish that more people would realize that simple
categorization and taxonomies are not going to take anyone very far on
the road towards findability. Hierarchies do not describe the world
very well, whether they be taxonomies, thesauri, or something else.
When you use them you nearly always end up with ill-defined categories
that cannot really be used for any form of automated processing, and
which do not really help searching very much, either.

If, on top of this, your ability to connect content with concepts is
also limited, then creating a model useful for navigation becomes
pretty much impossible. I've seen enough systems built with thesauri
and taxonomies by now to know that in bigger hierarchical systems
there is usually a lot of very useful information buried, but it *is*
buried. Getting the real data out of the mire is usually quite a bit
of work.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >