[Sigia-l] Taxonomies & Navigation

[Ruth Kaufman]

I'm in no way arguing that the content of a taxonomy can't also be the
content of navigation. This makes perfect sense. Often a subset of a
taxonomy will be revealed as a subset of the overall navigation
scheme.

In my experience, and maybe this is an unusual experience, certain
taxonomies contain a lot of stuff that you would not want to show to
users. Likewise, you may want to give users navigation options that
aren't sourced from a given taxonomy. You need to consider both
independently, and use the taxonomy only when appropriate. I sense
some folks may be understanding a navigation tree as a de facto
taxonomy. That is certainly possible, but probably not a "true"
taxonomy -- but that argument will quickly turn academic.

I think my views and guidance are most relevant to large-scale sites
that deal with legacy applications and content. If you are building
something from the ground up, you will have a lot more flexibility in
how you design your taxonomies and content model. But even then, it is
wise to think of how the site will need to scale and adapt in the
future. On one project I worked on, one of the stakeholders could not
adopt our new, improved taxonomy for their part of the web presence
because changing taxonomy sources for content tagging would have also
broken their portal and navigation structure, and they had not
budgeted for that scope. They probably originally thought that they
had a smart application architecture and tight data model (and I'm
sure they did), but in the end, when they had to change one part of
their system (CMS) without disrupting the other part (portal), they
found they had painted themselves into a corner.

I hope this is helping address the original question.

On 8/28/07, Renata Zilse : dmp.br <renata at dmppontobr.com.br> wrote:
> I modestly think that is an approach matter...
>
> Why should be navigation reflects the taxonomy?
>
> When we are talking about content and their organization - bottom-up
> approach - we are considering organizing information tools, including
> taxonomy. When we are talking about navigation and user experience -
> top-down approach - we must to consider ergonomics and usability
> engeneering method. In this point of view (like Reichnauer and
> Komischke, 2003), the user experience should not reflect the unit of
> information organizing system.
>
> Does anyone agree with that?
>
>
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> Renata Zilse | d e s i g n e r   a n d   i n f o r m a t i o n   a r
> c h i t e c t
>
>
> On Aug 27, 2007, at 5:28 PM, Ziya Oz wrote:
>
> > Ruth Kaufman:
> >
> >> A taxonomy is a classification system that can be used to classify
> >> things in
> >> the world -- classify, not address. It's an overlay.
> >
> > As an exercise: given a set of 'objects', is there one and only one
> > taxonomy?
> >
> > If not, can the notion of having multiple taxonomies approach the
> > concept of
> > 'navigating' that set of objects?
> >
> > In practice, can taxonomies be designed so that they can also serve as
> > navigational schemes?
> >
> > When is a sufficiently structured 'navigational' system not a
> > taxonomy?
> >
> > Can there be taxonomies without navigational systems?
> >
> > If taxonomy can describe every instance of its domain's objects
> > past and
> > present, how is that different from (addressable) navigation?
> >
> > In a future that's not doc-centric, isn't the notion of
> > 'navigation' just
> > obsolete?
> >
> > Just sayin'.
> >
> > Ziya
> > Nullius in Verba
> >
> >
> >
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