[Sigia-l] Taxonomies & Navigation

[Seth Earley]

In our workshops and client work on taxonomies, I always leave people with
the mantra "taxonomy is not the same as navigation".  This is the one thing
I want people to walk away with.  

One way to think about it is that taxonomy is a means of classifying
information that can be leveraged for navigation, but navigation is context
specific and may be audience specific.  

My typical example is that sales people want a place for White Papers,
Analyst Reports and Presentations that they will use for their selling
efforts.  They call these "Sales Tools".  A navigational construct might
look like:

Sales Tools 
	Analyst Reports
	White Papers
	Presentations
	...

But where do Analyst Reports, WP's and Presentations 'live' in my taxonomy?
They are actually Doc Types or Content Types.  Sales Tool is a navigational
label for that particular audience or task.  

Another way to think is that navigation is an access structure, not a
classification structure.  It is specific to content. We are navigating to
content, therefore it is really an index.  A taxonomy is independent of
content - it is an abstraction.  The "is-ness" of a thing.  This is an
Analyst Report, this is a White Paper, etc.  

An index (like a back of the book index) cannot be repurposed to new content
- you can't take one back of the book index and apply it to another book.  

A taxonomy can more easily be applied to new content.  

In terms of illustration, we typically will build navigational hierarchies
(which we do call navigational taxonomies) as well as the classification
structures.  Most of the time these are broken up into multiple controlled
vocabularies (some of which can be used as facets)

The whole notion of faceted navigation does make things more interesting.
This is a blurring of the line between navigation and search. Faceted
navigation essentially turns the taxonomy into a post coordinated index.
(That's a bit of a library term saying that we combine two or more terms
together at the time of search rather than having them as a single concept.
"Taxonomy Best Practices" is pre coordinated versus "Taxonomy", (and) "Best
Practices" is post coordinated).

A taxonomy management tool (like that of our subsidiary company, Wordmap)
can be used to illustrate this.  

Seth

Seth Earley
President
_____________________________

EARLEY & ASSOCIATES, Inc.
Cell: 781-820-8080
Office: 781-444-0287
Email: seth at earley.com
Web: www.earley.com


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Paula Majerowicz
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2007 3:07 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Taxonomies & Navigation

Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this subject....
 
A taxonomy is the "basis" for navigation but it is not necessarily "de
facto" navigation, especially for complex, content-rich sites. In a
situation such as this, content owners may feel that their "piece of the
world" is less important because they are not a nav item (especially when it
would require 4th or 5th or greater level nav to get to that content
hierarchically). 
 
Does anyone have any suggestions for how best to deal with visually
communicating the difference between a complex taxonomy and navigation?
(Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Hyperbolic maps, geneology-type maps, etc.)
 
Sure appreciate any thoughts.
 
Regards,
Paula
 
Paula M. Majerowicz
eCoreXperience
p. 800.619.5107 x704
c. 914.456.0702
f.  800.619.5107
pmajerowicz at ecorexperience.com
www.ecorexperience.com <http://www.ecorexperience.com/> 
 
Usability. Design for it.

------------
IA Summit 2008: "Experiencing Information" 
April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida

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