[il2007] Developing a Taxonomy
This session was led by Kathryn Breininger and Mary Whittaker, librarians with Boeing. They have additional materials available, which is good as there’s no way I can keep up. I’ll add the link or links once they’re up.
Taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary with broader/narrower relationships and a browsable hierarchical structure. It may include equivalent relationships.
Considerations
- Don’t duplicate an existing vocabulary
- Construction methods (committee, empirical, machine-assisted)
- Top-down better for new taxonomies, bottom-up for adding terms to existing taxonomy
- Dimensions of a taxonomy (industry perspective, business process
- Size of taxonomy
- Facets (can add to query to express in natural language)
- Intended use of taxonomy
Steps in developing a taxonomy:
- Idenfify scope, purpose, content format, subject/facet coverage, depth, type of content, volume of content, target audience, user needs, technological requirements
- Identify concepts (source materials, analyze search logs, inventory content, analyze content, determine content types, interview SMEs, identify existing taxonomies, extract candidate terms
- Develop draft taxonomy with common rules, reconciliation of terminology issues, use concepts universally, start broad not deep, develop upper levels of structure (7-10 major buckets), work from bottom-up and top-down
- Review with users and SMEs (provide draft for review, conduct usability studies, build consensus, keep a history of decisions, involve stakeholders, SMEs and users across the business). Iterative process.
- Refine taxonomy (incorporate refinements, review and refine cycle, know when to quit - don’t overbuild, low level of detail vs. value at the leaf node, establish test criteria)
- Apply taxonomy to content (provide guidelines for use, deploy - navigate web sites, tag content and integrate with existing applications)
- Manage and maintain taxonomy (establish ownership, establish governance and change control processes, develop maintenance plan, review content for new concepts, develop user feedback process for new concepts, maintain lifecycle - version control, review success criteria, provide documentation)
Review taxonomy periodically for currency, create a candidate list of terms for consideration, analyze items returned in error, sample newly added content, consider terms used excessively or infrequently
Testing the taxonomy
- Does the taxonomy provide appropriate search results
- Does the taxonomy match user expectations
- Evaluation criteria - should support taxonomy purpose
- Testing methods - heuristic evaluation (expert evaluation), affinity modeling (card sorting), usability testing (overall system)
Qualitative testing: demonstration to SMEs, conducting user satisfaction surveys, performing usability studies, analysis of items returned in error, tagging of sample content, testing of relevancy
Quantitative testing: How evenly does the taxonomy divide the content, how well does the taxonomy match the content, how well does the taxonomy cover the field, is the indexing repeatable?
Engaging people:
- Find a strong sponsor and champion
- Build a multi-disciplinary team (including end users as well as information professionals, IT, SMEs)
- Task IT with software maintenance
- Give SMEs, content owners and librarians responsibility for taxonomy
- Obtain end user buy-in
At this point, my battery died. Topics I remember being covered:
- Governance processes
- Taxonomy drivers
- Taxonomy benefits (productivity, searching, business)
- ROI considerations and analysis
- Best practices
- Things to avoid
- Critical success factors
Some of the questions:
- How to test a taxonomy before it goes public?
- Who applies the taxonomy?
- What software did Boeing use?
- Could they give a sample taxonomy?
Technorati Tags: il2007
