Search Done Right

For years now, people with a vested interest in information access—search vendors, librarians and other knowledge management professionals—have debated whether taxonomies will survive or if technologies like search eliminate the need for them.

I’ve been working in the enterprise search space for a number of years—not as long as some, but long enough to have heard many iterations of this debate. One version is, “Will auto-classification and semantic search technologies become sophisticated enough to replace taxonomies?” Another version transforms the question to, “Can folksonomies created by users via tagging replace the need for structured taxonomies?”

Gilbane analyst Lynda Moulton recently illuminated this issue in a great post, “Taxonomy and Enterprise Search.” She reminds us that:

‘Taxonomies, when properly employed, serve triple duty. Exposing them to search engines that are capable of categorizing content puts them into play as training data. Setting them up within content management systems provides a control mechanism and validation table for human assigned metadata. Finally, when used in a navigated search environment, they provide a visual map of the content landscape.’

As other experts have pointed out over the years, the difficulties in building a good taxonomy include cost, time and potential bias toward one or more departments. Yet, after hearing the arguments pro and con, I’ve come to see that consideration of taxonomies is not a zero sum game. Organizations need multiple paths to success in meeting the information needs of different users. In my next post, we’ll talk about some of these potential paths.

Tags: auto-classification, folksonomy, search, semantic search, tagging, taxonomy

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.