Heather Hedden's blog

Taxonomists never work in isolation: they collaborate with subject matter experts, content managers, systems integrators, information architects, and webmasters, among others. One type of professional whose area of expertise requires close work with taxonomists is usability or user experience professionals. Quite simply, usability professionals design user interfaces to software, websites, and information services, among other products and services, to make them easier to use. Since the objective of a taxonomy is to help users find information, and user professionals’ goal is to help users achieve their tasks and goals, there is obviously some overlap.

Experienced taxonomists are already familiar with usability issues, and usability professionals who work on website or online information systems usually have some familiarity with taxonomy. But each may not have full expertise in the other’s field, and thus it makes sense to collaborate.

Taxonomists and usability experts not only collaborate to achieve better results, but they can also learn from each other. I recently found this to be the case when I attended the UPA Boston Ninth annual Mini Conference on June 9. “Mini” is hardly the name for it, with 450 attendees, 32 speakers in four simultaneous tracks of sessions. Yet I was the only taxonomist among the hundreds of user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience experts, and the like.

What Usability Experts Can Learn About Taxonomies

Information professionals interested in taxonomies now have another conference, besides Information Today’s Taxonomy Boot Camp, that has numerous taxonomy sessions. This is the annual conference, usually in June, of the professional association SLA (Special Libraries Association). I attended this year’s conference for the first time, which was held in New Orleans, June 13-16, and was quite impressed with its taxonomy-focused sessions and networking opportunities.

Although there is no professional association dedicated just to taxonomists, the new Taxonomy Division of SLA has begun to change that. SLA is the leading international association of library and information professionals working corporate settings, government, nonprofits, and educational institutions with specialized research and information management needs. Until recently, its Knowledge Management Division came closest to serving the interests of taxonomists, but since August 2009, those engaged in taxonomy work now have their own group within the association. The SLA annual conference in June this year was thus the first that the Taxonomy Division was able to sponsor sessions, and it did in a big way. In the past, SLA included only a pre-conference workshop and perhaps a single session on taxonomies, but this time the two and a half days of regular sessions was filled with taxonomy-related programs in every time-slot and one time with conflicting taxonomy sessions.

Taxonomy consultants, such as those at Earley & Associates, may be the ones who develop a taxonomy for an organization, but the organization's own staff will ultimately be responsible for maintaining it, so the question arises what tool or tools should be used the maintain that taxonomy and perhaps further develop it. A taxonomy may be implemented in a CMS, in SharePoint, or with search (Google Search Appliance, FAST, etc.), but these systems do not have taxonomy management components.

An interest in taxonomy tools was evident by the number of chat-based questions that my colleague Seth Maislin and I received from participants in this week’s Taxonomy Community of Practice Call, Cross-Mapping Taxonomies, which we jointly presented. There is a need for tools that do more than merely enabling manual adding and deleting of terms. Mapping two taxonomies is something that only a few tools support, but there are many other day-to-day taxonomy management activities that also require specialized taxonomy management software.

This week several Earley & Associates consultants, including myself, participated in a special training on Smartlogic Ontology Manager, a good example of full-featured taxonomy management software. The question arises:  is this taxonomy management or ontology management software?

If we look at competing software products, we see various designations: