Information Research Weblog

Always wanted to know everything about Corporate Taxonomies? Now it is possible with Evert Jagerman's Publication

CREATING, MAINTAINING AND APPLYING QUALITY TAXONOMIES

Amsterdam, Netherlands - November 22, 2006- "Our lives are surrounded with systems of classifications. To classify is human. We all spend large parts of our lives doing classification work, often tacitly, and we make up and use a range of ad hoc classifications to do so. Think of daily practice. We sort dirty dishes from clean, white laundry from colour fast, important email from e-junk. Our desktops are examples of classifications"

Although we try to organise our thoughts by language we know that one of the beautiful aspects of language and the human mind is the limitless and varied ways that we are able to translate our knowledge and needs into direct and indirect speech acts and actions. Metaphors, idioms and synonyms for example can bring variety and precision to our conversations and our writings.

But this variety presents KM systems with one of their biggest challenges. If an author of an information artefact (such as a document) uses information it is hard to connect the artefact and its creator with its seeker. Technology cannot solve this problem, but you can solve it by making use of another type of managed knowledge "taxonomies" to provide a common framework of concepts (and relations between these concepts) to structure the lexical elements of language.

That is what this new book is about. How to create, maintain and apply these taxonomies in a way that will bring the creator of knowledge and the searcher for knowledge close to each other. A diversity of search methods, indexing languages and classification types pass the foot light to give context to the world of the taxonomy. Three methods of creation are explained. These are the top-down method, the bottom-up method and the faceted approach. Often taxonomy building is seen as the end of the line. But then the work of the taxonomy architect and his team starts. Business rules for taxonomy maintenance (adding, archving, deleting, moving terms) and naming conventions are explained. In the chapter Validating taxonomies, an assessment of the quality of taxonomies is made. For this a part of Quality Function Deployment is applied. Here you can see the House of Quality described for taxonomies."

The book is published at Lulu.com. You can find a description at:

http://www.lulu.com/content/505997 Price of the book is $ 32.50

ABOUT AUTHOR Evert Jagerman has over 10 years of experience in creating taxonomies. Evert has a Masters Degree from the University of Amsterdam in Book & Information Science and he also has a Masters degree from Middlesex University in Knowledge Management Technology.

ABOUT LULU Founded in 2002, Lulu is the world's fastest-growing print-on-demand marketplace for digital do-it-yourselfers. Please see www.lulu.com for more information.

MEDIA CONTACT Evert Jagerman, Amsterdam, ejagerman@gmail.com