Content related to Taxonomy Roller Coasters: Techniques to Keep Stakeholders on the Ride
How Leveraging Existing Taxonomies Can Jumpstart Ontology Design
Taxonomies and ontologies are both types of Knowledge Organization Systems, or KOS. Different types of KOS can be seen as a continuum, starting with a simple folksonomy where users of content can add free form tags with no control or … Continue reading
How to Distinguish Between Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Metadata Fields
When designing an enterprise taxonomy, the number of possible metadata fields that can be used to describe content can be overwhelming. Depending on the type of content, the size of the organization, and the breadth of that organization’s functions, the … Continue reading
The Value of Taxonomy: Why Taxonomy (Still) Matters
After decades of taxonomy design consulting, I’m still amazed that some organizations doubt the value of effective enterprise taxonomy design. Though knowledge and information management technologies, as well as associated search technologies have changed, the core business value and use … Continue reading
Developing Good KM Habits to Make KM Stick
Clients often ask me how to make Knowledge Management (KM) a seamless part of their workforce’s day-to-day operations. They want to know how to shift people’s perceptions from KM as “another thing I have to do in addition to my … Continue reading
Taxonomy Is Here! Taxonomy and the Final Season of Game of Thrones
Despite the fact that the first day of Spring occurred only a couple weeks ago, it appears that winter is finally upon us. The eighth and final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones officially premieres on April 14th, and the … Continue reading
Achieving a Gold Standard Taxonomy
One of the first steps of a taxonomy design effort is to gather any previous taxonomies that may exist within the business, as well as sample content, search logs, and pre-existing information about these taxonomies’ content or systems. At EK, … Continue reading
Complement Your Change Management Efforts with Gamification
Despite being a relatively new concept in the KM field, gamification is already an overused term that gets thrown around in virtually any initiative. Defined as an organization’s use of design and insights from video games to increase participant engagement … Continue reading
Pattern Discovery through Facets
As explored in my previous blog post How Faceted Navigation Works, facets allow you to quickly and efficiently sort through your content to find the information or data that you need. Facets largely mirror taxonomic structures, and business taxonomies are … Continue reading
How Faceted Navigation Works
What does the term ‘faceted navigation’ call to mind? For search-savvy individuals, it’s a search experience similar to that which you would find on Amazon. Facets primarily allow an individual to quickly sort through large amounts of information to locate … Continue reading
What’s in a Name? Not Your Org Chart.
An unfortunately common practice in organizations is to use an organization chart as a basis for tagging content in repositories: files, folders, and taxonomies mirror the names of the units, divisions, and teams that created them. However, organizations change. Businesses … Continue reading