The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.
Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future as:
Social search
having the ability to notify, share and improve / refine search results become available.
Shared desktops
Teams wish to synchronize the structure of their file folders and those of colleagues - making retrieval easier.
Intuitive navigation
Firms seek to provide access to content using visual tools, enable the location of related items, give a user-friendly browsing experience. This is greater enhanced if the staff share a set of key concepts and issues.
Some of the tools to do this are appearing:
* Topic maps - an emerging XML standard to assist data display, sharing ontologies and depicting relationships
* Visual browsers - open source code to map sites, display searches, navigate wiki and hypertext webs
* Concept mapping - practices for knowledge construction, learning and conceptualization
The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.
Imagine if you wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later search and browsing - Now that would really assist content sharing!
I believe in a shared common taxonomy less and less. I'm starting to see cultural gradients and semantic gradients as the key contributor to requirements and interface issues in software.
We use the common semantics myth as a means of applying semantically insensitive techniques in the hopes that the data created in such a manner actually has any meaning at all.
Posted by: David Locke | November 30, 2004 at 04:03 PM
hey, stumbled across your site from http://www.halcon.com.au .. really liked some of your entries, keep it up!
Posted by: joe | November 28, 2004 at 01:50 AM