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| Image courtesy of Pop Chart Lab (available as a poster!) |
Organization is my dirty little
secret. Dirty, because it never seems to trickle down to my own desk, rendering
me a professional pig pen. Secret, because I hungrily digest research on sophisticated
ways to relate, arrange, and organize information, terrified that I would be
pilloried if anyone saw what I was reading.
But “little” is a misnomer. When I am
presented with inefficient, ineffective methods of knowledge management that both
waste my time and confuse me, I can rage. Like a wild-eyed wildebeest raised solely
on Google algorithms, I can rage. And so begins a bender into the world of taxonomies
and their much maligned cousins, folksonomies, better known as social tagging.
Rather than cause me innumerable
suffering, taxonomies are supposed to help make sense of the world. (Who could
live without a taxonomy of beer? Beer.) Taxonomies work behind the scenes, allowing us to fit our product quickly into the right space, so that it can be retrieved by someone else at a later time. They are not just family trees of animal classifications that branch off into the ether, although hierarchies are
the form in which they most often appear. Ideally, taxonomies are comprised of
three major components: schemes that classify and group items, controlled vocabularies that serve to explain and relate terms, and knowledge maps that
clearly demonstrate relationships.
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| Image courtesy of Green Chameleon |
The key word is relationship. It’s very hard work, as we all know. Taxonomies are
living creatures; they must not only be established, but tested, and maintained
regularly. There is no one correct way
to structure a taxonomy, demonstrated by challenges to these suggested types of science in science fiction. Do we all agree on how this
is organized? I doubt it. (I bet a minor war might break out between CandyBuffet and FreshSnaps if we ever dared to discuss it.) And just think of how much effort has to go into
keeping this
up-to-date. It's an ever-expanding universe of information! Most fields are, except for Latin and Star Wars. We all like certainty and structure in our relationships, but with
the pace of knowledge generation and dissemination, how can practical
taxonomies keep up? Like the good cynic I am, I argue that they cannot possibly
do so. Enter folksonomies, stage right.
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| Image courtesy of Little Red Crayon |
Wikipedia has an excellent entry
on folksonomies, with a
nicely articulated definition: “A folksonomy is a system of classification
derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing
tags to annotate and categorize content.” Contrary to popular belief and Bill Murray, it is not
mass chaos.
Organization does emerge, categories can be identified, especially at higher
levels, and among groups of individuals working in similar fields. Complex adaptive systems, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point (though he
never uses the term), run rampant in our society, including our knowledge management
systems. They forsake top-down, centrally managed systems for user-generated
classifications. Patterns shift as knowledge is generated, used, and modified,
which is incredibly fast. It shouldn't be that surprising: people are good at classifying their own stuff, and the stuff that they're interested in. Perhaps a tenuous relationship can emerge, where
folksonomies help to craft taxonomies and maintain their relevance. And then
maybe we all can find organizational happiness in the balance.
