Mike Shulha's blog

The Faceted Fallacy

... If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?

Yes I know it’s a silly old question, with no real definitive answers but it makes our brains think creatively about ambiguous problems, which is fun.  A recent thread in the Taxonomy Community of Practice really got me thinking this way in relation to taxonomy.  

To summarize the thread, the question was raised, what are the most commonly used facets in an enterprise taxonomy? In response one member posted a “definitive” list of primary facets that could be used as an exhaustive skeleton for the “enterprise”.  From here the conversation split in multiple ways:

“Having the people,systems and governance in place to facilitate a cross channel view of marketing assets and customer experience is a critical challenge many organizations are facing”

Laura Keller, Strategist at MISI company 

Silos Revisited

In many organizations the responsibility for creating marketing assets is decentralized and siloed by channel. One group is working on email marketing, another on web commerce, others on social media and still other groups on more traditional print and broadcast. Without solid governance and systems to support a view across these channels, companies are missing a tremendous opportunity to: 

1. Re-use marketing assets
2. Realize value from cross channel synergies
3. Evaluate the consistency and quality of marketing assets

Much has been written on this blog about the value of SEO when it comes to taxonomies.  As Stephanie mentions its’ a huge weapon in the battle against outdated legacy terminology and spur of the second marketing speak. Jeff’s posts on keyword research, taxonomy and SEO are indispensable primers on the topic. So what haven’t we talked about yet?

How about SEO as the enemy of navigation? 

Is there such a problem as too much of a good thing? When it comes to taxonomy navigation best practices and SEO, you bet.  Think about it this way: imagine you are meeting a friend for drinks after work and she tells you a story about something that happened to her during the day. 

“I was in my office, and I had just poured myself a fresh cup of coffee.  I was in my office and the phone rang but I was tempted to ignore it. I was in my office and picked up the phone and it was my husband calling, did I mention I was in my office? Anyways I was in my office and my husband told me to sit down because he had incredible news. I was in my office and I sat down. I was in my office and my husband told me that we had just won the lottery?

Right, so... where were you again?  In your office, ok we get it!  

Now have a look at the following taxonomy navigation suggested to us on a project for SEO purposes:

I spent this past week testing a taxonomy as part of a digital asset management project we are currently working on. One of the test scenarios involved giving art taggers a series of images and asking them to code them using the taxonomy we had developed.

Taggers see taxonomy as a blessing and a curse. On the one hand controlled vocabularies are a tagger's dream; a nice list of consistent terms that alleviate the problems of free-tagging (e.g. five variations on the same term, plural vs. singular, spelling mistakes, etc.) However, these same vocabularies quickly become a tagger's nightmare when they perceive the values to overlap or be ambiguous - especially if you are used to only being able to select one value from the list.

Testing and validating a taxonomy can go many ways.  With a little luck and some hard work, usually it goes pretty well, you watch users click through the structure, find the right terms, and you go home feeling like everything's in its right place. 

Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." (1)

Recently Chris Anderson wrote an article for Wired magazine called the The End of Theory. The thesis of the article in a nutshell is that the impending petabyte era of data storage signals the end of the traditional scientific method of discovery. No longer are we bound to the outdated model of observation, hypothesis and measurement. Computers (developed by Google & IBM) "can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot."

In our work of building and maintaining e-commerce taxonomies, we often run into the problem of products not fitting nicely into one single category. Although this problem is not specific to e-commerce taxonomies, their use for navigation and browsing presents a special categorization challenge; the need to lead a wide range of customer types down an intuitive path to the product they are looking for. Think about something as simple as a pair of headphones: where do they belong in the following hierarchy?