archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’m presenting for the Taxonomy Community of Practice web seminar today. I’ll be talking about a long-term, enterprise-level strategy and design engagement for a financial services client, sharing work that combines information architecture and taxonomy efforts over the past year.

The agenda for the call includes several other speakers; it should be a strong showcase of information architecture and taxonomy work from different settings.

If you’d like to listen, some details are below. Registration and more information is available from www.earley.com/events.htm

Date and time: Friday, December 1st, 2006 – 2:00 to 3:30 PM EDT

Duration: 90 minutes

Format: Teleconference

Cost: $50 per attendee

Register for the session (you will receive dial-in instructions and slides the day before the call)

Description:
User Experience design is often thought of as distinct or different from taxonomy design. What are good IA practices and how do they influence taxonomy design? In this session you’ll hear from three experienced IA’s who will share specific examples from their organizations and consulting projects that will illustrate principles that you can apply in your taxonomy projects.

In this session, hear about:

• a user experience design effort that combines information architecture and taxonomy approaches for a major financial services client
• specific experiences applying IA with Compaq and HP and “business taxonomies” – taxonomies that live within strict business limitations

Presenters:
Seth Earley, Earley & Associates

Joe Lamantia

Bob Goodman

Andrew Gent, Hewlitt Packard

Setting good expectations for the outcomes of a taxonomy design effort is often difficult. It can be especially if any of the following are true:

• The goal is to create an initial taxonomy, and no reference exists
• The solution environment the taxonomy will “live in” is in flux (owners, tools, governance…)
• The business scope which the taxonomy will address is not well defined
• Organizational awareness of taxonomy concepts and is low
• Organizational maturity and experience with managing information architectures and metadata is low

When dealing with situations like these, consider changing the emphasis and goals of the effort to a “taxonomy pilot”. This will shift the expectations you need to meet from creating a production-ready taxonomy that can stand on its own something more reasonable, such as an interim taxonomy that effectively solves a limited scope problem, while setting in motion a well balanced taxonomy effort likely to be successful in the longer term.
The objectives of a taxonomy pilot effort that balances short and long term business needs in this way could be:

The project plan for a pilot taxonomy effort aiming to achieve the objectives above should further a culture of learning, rather than scope of accomplishment. This kind of plan would:

• Establish frequent checkpoints that bring all interested parties together to discuss the process itself, in addition to accomplishments and milestones
• Create regular forums where taxonomy designers and business sponsors make decisions on tools and standards with guidance from qualified experts
• Incorporate multiple iterations or cycles of user driven review and revision of in-progress taxonomies
• Include time for the creation of “next time” recommendations for what to do differently or the same as a group

Of course, it’s not always possible to change expectations, especially after funding and timelines are set. When expectations are unreasonable and set stone, take shelter in the inevitable “next version” and frame the taxonomy you’re designing as an initial effort that will require subsequent revision…

While researching and evaluating user interfaces and management tools for semantic structures – ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, etc – I’ve come across or been directed to two good surveys of tools.
The first, courtesy of HP Labs and the SIMILE project is Review of existing tools for working with schemas, metadata, and thesauri. Thanks to Will Evans for pointing this out.
The second is a comprehensive review of nearly 100 ontology editors, or applications offering ontology editing capabilities, put together by Michael Denny at XML.com. You can read the full article Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools, or go directly to the Summary Table of Survey Results.
The original date for this is 2002 – it was updated July of 2004.

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