[Sigia-l] Taxonomy + Folksonomy ?

[Timo Kouwenhoven]

Hi Christopher,

A colleague and I are designing the kind of system you describe for a
customer of ours here in The Netherlands.

It's a large R&D organisation working on a plethora of topics for the
government and the industry. We have been able to design a taxonomy for them
that will work as a controlled vocabulary. The problem was/is that the
amount of depth they could agree upon is rather shallow. The differences in
'jargon' on a more detailed level is too big, so they could not agree on a
common vocabulairy for these levels. By allowing them to add their own terms
freely, in a floksonomy fashion, they are able to add metadata AND the
controlled vocabulairy manager is able to find more common terms among the
folksonomy terms. There will be more common terms, that's for sure, but the
owners just don't know it yet, so we will let them emergerce bottom up.

The structure used to build this is XML-RDF based, implemented using java
part of their IBM websphere portal software.

Best,

Timo
senior information architect
Det Norske Veritas - ITGS
The Netherlands

2007/4/27, Christopher Fahey <chris.fahey at behaviordesign.com>:
>
> Howdy all,
>
> I'm imagining a system (for a project) where a fixed taxonomy exists,
> but where each node in the taxonomy is also associatated (editorially,
> by humans) with a series of folksonomy tags.
>
> So, for example, the system's fixed taxonomy might have:
>
> Animals-->Carnivores-->Felines-->DomesticCats
>
> Each node of this taxonomy might then be associated with various free
> folksonomic tags, so the taxonomic "Animals" might also include any data
> object tagged with the folksonomy tag "critters". Objects tagged "meat
> eaters" or "predators" would fall under "Carnivores"
>
> As users create arbitrary new folksonomy tags (for example someone
> spontaneously tags an article about housecats with "kitties"), an editor
> will catch the new tag and then find a close analogue among the fixed
> taxonomy (in this case, "kitties would map to "DomesticCats").
>
> This system implies that much of the content will not marked by the
> taxonomy, either because it is being imported from elsewhere or because
> we don't want to show a complex taxonomy UI to a user, instead just
> letting them tag freely.
>
> Has anyone seen a system like this in place somewhere?
>
> Is this simply a synonym system, or is it something more?
>
> Any thoughts on such a system?
>
> Thanks,
> -Cf
>
> Christopher Fahey
> ____________________________
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> http://www.behaviordesign.com
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-- 
Timo Kouwenhoven
Utrecht
The Netherlands

Si vales bene est, ego quoque valeo.