[Sigia-l] Taxonomies & Navigation

[Ruth Kaufman]

Melvin wrote:
> understand the context ad define what is it you actually need, every
> one of  those terms are used as synonms depending who , which
> organization, which function or dept etc...etc..

Yes, and no. In fact, there are real meanings to these words, and
while these may all have something in common, they're not synonyms. If
this stuff isn't your primary focus, then it might not matter what the
nuanced differences are. But if this is your bread and butter, it
can't hurt to know what each type of artifact or expression is.  I
certainly empathize with your POV, though. We're holding a"taxonomy"
workshop at my company today, and one of the goals of the workshop is
to get people to think more in terms of classification and
categorization, relative to navigation and the overall user
experience, rather than to call all of this "taxonomy" -- which is
something very specific and, in most cases, a misnomer.

And Filip wrote:
> > > The offer is where the content is created and typically this is a
> > > structured environment where each peace of information can be placed in a
> > > unique box. Furthermore each peace of information comes with a set of meta
> > > data explicit (added by the author) and implicit (added by the "system").
> > > This is a taxonomy, a means of classifying information where each individual
> > > peace exists only once and has a unique address (as such a paragraph has a
> > > unique place within a document which has ... ).

My understanding is that a taxonomy never includes instances and
addresses of objects, data or otherwise. Think if the "animal kingdom"
taxonomy. You and I are not nodes in that classification system.
Instances and objects come and go, but the taxonomy remains the same
except when major learnings and discoveries are made. A taxonomy is a
classification system that can be used to classify things in the world
-- classify, not address. It's an overlay. It is not a fully developed
object model nor a data model, which is what I think you're describing
here.

The way I explain this to my colleagues and clients is that a taxonomy
expresses a certain type of hierarchical relationship. Each child is a
"type of" its parent. That's what I came up with as  a "true"
taxonomy, although I don't deny that many will continue to stretch its
meaning. There are lots of other types of relationships to be had...
such as "part of". This is the stuff of object models.

(My goal here is to work on these concepts w/the community, not to be
argumentative. I've been struggling with defining and explaining this
stuff for about a year now, and this is more or less where I've
landed.)

Ruth