Once you have a tentative list of terms for your taxonomy-to-be, it can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you have thousands of terms. (In scientific and technical fields, a typical taxonomy might have 5,000-10,000 terms.) How to start dealing with them all? A good first step is to organize the information into main categories. Choose some logical main areas, and don’t be too concerned up front about whether or not the areas or the initial wordings are exactly what you’ll ultimately want them to be. You’re just roughing things out at this stage. Then use those main areas as buckets, and dump the more specific terms into those buckets.
When you select the terms, you can select them from all those standard sources that might be available to you, like these: Existing taxonomies, thesauri, and classification schemes; Encyclopedias, lexicons, dictionaries, and glossaries; Books and journals, and their indexes; Databases; and Annual reviews and surveys. Also scan the literature in general; not just your literature but the literature of other publishers. I would encourage you to watch the international literature. A tremendous amount of what is happening these days is happening outside the United States. We tend to take a rather parochial view of what is happening in our own field and knowledge organization systems. I would say that there is more happening in Europe than in the United States at the moment. They are way ahead of us in actually getting taxonomic implementations done and pushing the envelopes for thinking. So, those of us in non-European countries need to need to pay attention to what is happening in Europe.
Earlier this year, you may recall, we demonstrated the far-reaching and all-encompassing nature of taxonomies when we highlighted the taxonomical approach sportswriters apply to making preseason baseball predictions in Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball. With the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympic Games, we could not pass up the opportunity to once again share some insights into two of our favorite things—sports and taxonomies!
There are several ways to create a taxonomy. One is from the existing data, which is my preferred method. You can also do it as an intellectual outline of the discipline, thinking about what ought to be included in this discipline. That is what the monks did many years ago in their cold towers on those mountainsides. Few of us have that luxury. Most of us will be dealing with a specific corpus of information.
Semantic networks provide structure to a set of concepts, as a network or a web. They are often defined as graph representations of the relationships among a set of concepts. In a larger sense, in the world of computer science, they are a set of concepts with relationships that are defined in such a way that computers, or the World Wide Web, can work with those relationships.
Ontologies are the newest label attached to knowledge organization systems (KOSs). They are generally specific modules and models developed by the knowledge management community. Stanford University has developed an ontology software called Protégé, which people seem to either love or hate. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground. They are either very fond of it: “Oh, I just love Protégé!”; or they hate it: “I don’t understand that tool; it doesn’t make any sense to me.” I don’t know which class you will fall into, but it is open source software and it is available. So, try it out and make your own decision.
Access Innovations, Inc. announces a free webinar, "Visualization for Data Analysis: A New Way to Look at Content" to be presented on July 10th, 2012 at 1:00 PM Mountain time by Access CEO Marjorie M.K. Hlava.
Recently, Jenn Webb interviewed Josh Marinacci, an expert on user interfaces and on Java development. The interview, “Josh Marinacci: 90% will rely on mobile, but 10% will still need desktops”, focused on the nature of the transition from reliance on full-size desktop and laptop devices to use of smaller devices for some of the same purposes.