- Image via Wikipedia
eTaxonomy: Breakfast of Champions | Earley & Associates.
I speak to many CIO’s who think taxonomy is an arcane piece of library science. Haven’t they heard of eTaxonomy? Well, of course not. While we labor to embed taxonomies into technology solutions, vendors take the credit for their “highly configurable solutions.” The good but unrecognized work we do needs a 21st century name – hence eTaxonomy.
Etaxonomy is the art and science of integrating taxonomy into deployable IT solutions. Our professional community of taxonomy practitioners is getting sophisticated at this. The best web sites today achieve usability through dynamic content presentation enabled by taxonomy. New classes of solutions, such as Marketing Resource Management, get their power from hierarchical information models that integrate diverse information sources. And critical initiatives in healthcare, such as electronic patient records, leverage taxonomies for coding.
So taxonomy is not your father’s library science construct. It’s not a spreadsheet of terms. Rather, it’s about methodologies for enabling smart computing through the use of sophisticated semantic models. That’s what eTaxonomy is. So taxonomists of yore, start calling yourself eTaxonomists, and make sure your CIO knows about the secret sauce.
In future blogs, I will discuss eTaxonomy in different solution settings. I look forward to getting feedback on this concept and whether it will help you make your case to management. Also, check out our Insight Webinar Series for a deep dive into eTaxonomy solutions and approaches.
The word taxonomy brings strong reactions. It does sound arcane. In the stock image retrieval business we’ve been using taxonomies for years without naming them as such. The library professionals who did the ground work on which we based our ‘controlled vocabularies’ need to be praised and given the light of day. Sexier words like retrieval depend on lots background work. We can all see the the effects of lack of taxonomy/vocabulary work when we do a search on some pretty major web sites and get results that blow the mind. The reach is enormous, the specificity approaching zero. The human mind is discerning, clever, and used to putting things in to boxes, and it’s still needed to keep our content under control.
Seth, excellent points. Not sure how to change the perception of taxonomy work though when so often the message presented is, “Oh just get any old librarian or grad student who took one class in controlled vocabularies to create your taxonomy on a three month contract basis, and you’ll be competing with the big boys then!” Reading between the lines of job notices, this comes through loud and clear all the time, and I want to start calling certain people out on it! Well, I don’t really want to do that, but it annoys the heck out of me, and if I get one more notice about a job requiring a part-time taxonomist with little to no experience to work for three months for a “prestigious” organization, I just might come out swinging. The unfortunate part of this is that so many people are needing positions these days, they’ll take those just to get by until a viable position comes along. Anyhow, thanks for making these points, but I’m not sure how they’re going to play out; somewhere along the line, taxonomist somehow came to equate teacher or “lots of work but little pay.”