Musings on Taxonomy
September 29, 2009 by Filip Tack · 1 Comment
Maybe it is just me, but I’m having a hard time when it comes to organizing my digital “assets.” God only knows how many times I’ve started with the best intentions, creating folders and subfolders, coming up with well thought through naming conventions. I’m not only trying to do that with my documents, but also with emails, bookmarks, and what-have-I. All with one singular purpose: impose structure on the fruits of my chaotic mind.
Well, I’ve decided to give it up. To me, the taxonomy remedy is worse than the disease. Especially when the fruits of the mind proliferate in abundance or I start collaborating. Because in the latter case, everybody on the team feels urged to impose some kind of structure to the naming conventions – fiercely defending the wiring of one’s own brain (sort of). And we are not really helped by technology either. I wonder how much dead taxonomies are created on a daily basis using content management systems and SharePoint-like platforms.
Nope, I’ve stopped pondering over the structuring challenge. I’m betting on the second law of thermodynamics (i.e., chaos) and desktop search: using Spotlight on my Mac and Google Desktop on the PC. It’s actually great to see these technologies neatly indexing my Nomadesk Fileservers without any help from me at all. And, when I’m not logged-on in the Nomadesk client, Spotlight or Google Desktop no longer show the search results for the Nomadesk Fileservers; pretty neat privacy!
Glad to have inspired you, Filip.
It’s always interesting to watch product demos that involve taxonomies. Take content management demos, for example. Typically the vendor will have created some small structure of folders/containers for documents, templates, work flows and such. Their intent is to show customers how they can easily save and organize these assets using their applications. That works fine for a demo, but it’s a longer term nightmare in reality.
In reality, few users have just a handful of neatly organized folders containing a few dozens information assets. Rather, we have hundreds or thousands of folders and tens of thousands of assets or more living on our desktops, laptops, servers, hand helds etc. Now multiple that by 10, 100 or 1000 employees to understand the impact on business.
As an example, I have hundreds of megabytes of bookmarks dating back nearly 20 years, and across multiple browsers. In the early days with a few dozen bookmarks, a taxonomy was practical. I could fairly quickly browse to the bookmark that I needed. However, as the number of bookmarks grew, no matter how they were organized it was quicker and easier to just type in a URL and browse a website to find what I needed.
Imagine trying to browse a taxonomic repository of potentially hundreds or thousands of workflow templates, stylesheets, forms etc..
For the past several years I have chosen to work smarter. I might tag/name documents, templates and bookmarks with taxonomic keywords, but I rarely organize them into any formal structure. Instead, I rely upon indexed search tools much the same as you do. In fact, I use the two you had mentioned. And for large businesses there are others search options too.
Unlike the cumbersome, inefficient process of independently browsing the taxonomies of a web browser, a file system and an email server. We can do it all in a single federated, indexed search. I can find every email, business contact, calendar entry, document, application and bookmark containing the keyword(s) of interest.
With the exception of my client folders, named for each client, I rely mostly upon intelligent search to find what I need across all of my information assets. Coming from someone who used to develop content management systems for a living – I speak from experience.