[Sigia-l] Taxonomies & Navigation

[Ziya Oz]

Seth Earley:
 
> 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.

Yes, this is how things have been, not necessarily how they might be in the
future: the nature of 'content' can/will change from document-centric to
data-centric.

I think I talked about this example some time ago: in a project I'm
currently working on, there's a large SharePoint document DB that's doubled
to 150 GB in just a few months I have been considering it. Why? Because the
company is doc-centric and essentially captures every imaginable data,
analysis, communication, documentation, etc., in a 'document' of one sort or
another. Some of these docs are live, most are 'frozen'. But docs keep
growing. Heck, almost at a compounding rate. This is not an unusual
situation in companies with a high rate of info/data circulation.

So the 'classic'' approaches to the problem have been towards making the
access and navigation of this exploding reservoir of docs more 'manageable'.
Soon, however, diminishing returns begins to rear its ugly head.

The drastic and scalable solution lies in a totally different direction:
eliminating 'documents' altogether by giving access to live, real-time
'views' of the data, customized just-in-time for specific uses and users.
Multi-dimensional metadata can allow the architect to shape the 'view' in
amazing ways, not possible with frozen docs, thereby eliminating the need
for users to actually 'navigate'. Taxonomy dissolves into multi-dimensional
(not faceted) metadata and rarely needs to be exposed to the user. Of
course, there's a rules engine running in the background, orchestrating the
whole thing.

No docs: not much to store, version, maintain, archive, purge, etc. And no
formal navigation, either.

This gets complicated, if one's not used to dealing at this level of
abstraction and integration, but the power therein is undeniable. I intend
to write about it in detail in a blog or something, one of these months.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba