Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. Taxonomies, or taxonomic schemes, are composed of taxonomic units known as taxa (singular taxon), or kinds of things that are arranged frequently in a hierarchical structure.
#30577
As Simple As Possible...And No Simpler 
A PowerPoint presentation about the difficulties of categorizing technical communication. It's not an easy thing to do, if the journals and textbooks in our own field don't consistently agree as to the major and minor categories. This PDF version of a PowerPoint presentation outlines the issues confronted by the EServer TC Library as it attempts to create a system of categories for its index of thousands of works in the fields of technical, scientific and professional communication.
Sauer, Geoffrey. ATTW (2005). Presentations>TC>Taxonomy
#28931
Many Web professionals consider content inventories critical parts of most projects. Are there certain specific things to look for during a content inventory? Fred Leise definitely thinks so. He proposes a set of content analysis heuristics and discusses how to utilize each one.
Leise, Fred. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Content Management>Taxonomy>Heuristic Evaluation
#28925
Measuring the Success Of a Classification System
When working with government and large private organizations on complex information systems, project managers and business representatives often demand early-stage validation that the proposed classification system provides the user-friendly solution they are charged with delivering. They also require this validation in a format that will be engaging for senior business stakeholders.
Barker, Iain. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy>User Centered Design
#33474
Move over DITA – Chaos is Coming!
I've never really questioned the need for hierarchical structure and imposed taxonomies, - until I watched my teenage daughter doing her homework several months ago.
Content Pool, The (2008). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy
#33492
Taxonomic Distress: The Challenge of Developing Effective Taxonomies for Web-Facing Businesses
A good taxonomy is a win for both a company and its customers. It’s easy to see why taxonomy development is good for your users: The whole reason for creating a taxonomy for your site is to make information retrieval quick and easy by putting the information into a sensible structure that’s consistently applied. Well-designed taxonomies map out the base structure for your content, providing a navigation scheme that makes sense to your users.
Becker, Lane. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy
#33493
Faucet Facets: A Few Best Practices for Designing Multifaceted Navigation Systems
Sometimes, content has many attributes that have different importance to different users. A hierarchy assumes everyone approaches these attributes the same way, but that’s often not the case.
Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy
#33579
Categorizing Professional Discourse: Engineering, Administrative, and Technical/Professional Writing 
Rhetorical categories can and should be developed by scholars of professional writing to identify how values held within professions constrain the ways discourse is interpreted in organizational settings. Empirical research (conducted by the author and others), discourse theory, and pedagogical practice in professional writing strongly suggest that at least three categories of professional writing exist: engineering, administrative, and technical/professional writing. The author demonstrates this claim and distinguishes the characteristics of these three categories. Engineering writing is shown to respond to professional values of scientific objectivity and professional judgment as well as to corporate interests. Administrative writing reflects the locus of decision-making authority and promotes institutional identity. Technical/professional writing aims to accommodate audience needs through complying with professional readability standards. Future research should focus on defining the characteristics of these varieties more precisely. Articulated definitions of these three varieties of professional writing can help scholars and practitioners better understand how discourse is framed and interpreted in organizational settings.
Couture, Barbara. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1992). Articles>TC>Taxonomy>Professionalism
#33642
Caught in the Current of Writer River: Building and Participating in Community-Driven Websites
When hundreds of people engage in content-generation and exchange, impressive results can happen — namely, you find a lot of interesting, accurate content. Writer River doesn’t have nearly enough community to be on par with these sites, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Johnson, Tom H. Intercom (2009). Articles>Content Management>Community Building>Taxonomy
#34185
Tag Clouds for Summarizing Web Search Results
In this paper, we describe an application, PubCloud that uses tag clouds for the summarization of results from queries over the PubMed database of biomedical literature. PubCloud responds to queries of this database with tag clouds generated from words extracted from the abstracts returned by the query. The results of a user study comparing the PubCloud tag-cloud summarization of query results with the standard result list provided by PubMed indicated that the tag cloud interface is advantageous in presenting descriptive information and in reducing user frustration but that it is less effective at the task of enabling users to discover relations between concepts.
Kuo, Byron Y-L., Thomas Hentrich, Benjamin M. Good and Mark D. Wilkinson. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy
#34193
The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging
The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for 'popular' sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags.
Halpin, Harry, Valentin Robu and Hana Shepherd. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Taxonomy>Collaboration
#34418
A discussion of social bookmarking; its use and trends.
KeyContent.org (2009). Articles>Web Design>Taxonomy>Social Networking
#34527
"With My Head Up in the Clouds": Using Social Tagging to Organize Knowledge 
Social tagging ranges among the ``killer applications'' of Web 2.0. An ever-growing international community uses Web sites such as the photo database Flickr and the bookmarking service Delicious. In addition, a number of other portals use tagging to compile user-specific metadata on information on any subject—whether it be travel destinations, personal contacts, films, or museum exhibits. Retrieving and storing information via tagging seems to meet users' needs for a number of purposes and in many contexts. Starting with a synopsis of the current literature on social tagging and then focusing on the results of two surveys—qualitative interviews and an online questionnaire—this article explores the potential and limitations of tagging as a tool for organizing shared and personal knowledge.
Panke, Stefanie. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2009). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy>Social Networking
#34542
Metadata has become in past few years the key element in the world of intellectual property creation and management. Most digital asset and content management system vendors now define their product by its ability to support custom metadata and in particulary Adobe’s XMP metadata technology. Besides being an excellent organizational tool, metadata is the essence of advertising, packaging and medical/financial/governmental record keeping and more. Every time we complete a form, we do so with metadata values in the form fields. Our Internet searches start with metadata keywords and end with information wrapped around and associated with those keywords.
Roszkiewicz, Ron. IDEAlliance (2009). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy>Metadata
#34561
Woodward Paths: Motorizing Space
This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines one specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space.
Rice, Jeff. Technical Communication Quarterly (2009). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy>Geography
#34970
Machine Learning for Asian Language Text Classification
The purpose of this research is to compare several machine learning techniques on the task of Asian language text classification, such as Chinese and Japanese where no word boundary information is available in written text. The paper advocates a simple language modeling based approach for this task.
Peng, Fuchun and Xiangji Huang. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Language>Taxonomy>Machine Translation
