Is Taxonomy Still Relevant?

In this article, Hanns Kohler-Kruner, Principal Consultant for HKK Consulting discusses whether taxonomy is still a relevant concept in a world where social tagging and other ‘looser’ information management approaches are commonplace.

“Of course Social Tagging implies the freedom of users to use whatever terms come most naturally when adding information to objects. Objects being any piece of content that can be added to, so not necessarily just a document. A taxonomy, on the other hand, is defined  as the art and science of classifying information. It often finds itself in a more or less hierarchic and predefined structure. Whether it is a single tree or multiple trees, linked across by shared vocabularies or thesauri, they are still more or less fixed in their structure. These two different approaches seem to be diametrically opposed if you first look at them.  Are they really? Yes, I think there is no question about that. They are very much different.” [Read More]

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