1. 16/10/2006Open Taxonomy Open Taxonomy: A Tag Browser/Editor to Increase Findability By Ken Cooley coolpearland@yahoo.com

2. 26/10/2006Open Taxonomy Introduction Its too darned hard to find what you’re looking for –Internet –Intranet –Enterprise –Google is not the answer

3. 36/10/2006Open Taxonomy Looking for Godot…

4. 46/10/2006Open Taxonomy “The Long Tail” of “obscure” searches represents half of all searches Probability distribution. Y axis = popularity, X axis = different categories. “The Long Tail”

5. 56/10/2006Open Taxonomy Social Networking Tagging Websites –Del.icio.us –Facetious –Flickr Really easy to add tags. Support sharing of indexed content. Folksonomies have a flat structure. –Limited at resolving ambiguities. –Similar limitations as Google.

6. 66/10/2006Open Taxonomy Wikipedia Grass Roots content creation. Let those who are most familiar & interested in a subject create the content. Content creation is more difficult than indexing existing content.

7. 76/10/2006Open Taxonomy Web Directories E.g. Yahoo (since 1994). Simple (but relatively fixed) drill down taxonomy. Eliminates ambiguity by restricting searches to sub-domains. Stale, less than intuitive.

8. 86/10/2006Open Taxonomy But, Taxonomies need to change constantly… Play the “Animals” game. http://www.animalgame.com/ http://www.animalgame.com/ Think of a “Water Buffalo”, and see what happens. New content frequently breaks the old taxonomy.

9. 96/10/2006Open Taxonomy Proposed: An Open Taxonomy Tag Browser/Editor Mash ‘em all up! Using Ruby on Rails –Webpage allows navigating a directory of categories –Users can create their own category tags, and link content to them. –They can tag existing tags, adding additional categories anywhere in the bottom half of the taxonomy. –Other users vote on these tags to make them part of the official taxonomy.

10. 106/10/2006Open Taxonomy Navigating the taxonomy Tree of categories in left window. Icons denote type, sub-category, synonym, part-of, etc. Current location (in the tree) listed at the top. Indexed content in the center. “Elected” categories are displayed by default. Optionally, “Candidate” categories can be seen. Vote button for favorite Candidates. Hits on Candidates also count (but less so).

11. 116/10/2006Open Taxonomy Adding or changing categories Tag the tags (one tag is a sub-category of another). A few other relationships supported. –Part-of –Attribute-of –Related-to Parent tags could be constrained to a level in the tree.

12. 126/10/2006Open Taxonomy Pros Ever spent > 1 hour searching for something obscure (in the heart of “The Long Tail”)? This would save a ton of time. Incentives to use it (self interest) –If it can’t be found, fix the taxonomy, so it can be found next time. –Others will make other things easier for you to find (the Wikipedia golden rule).

13. 136/10/2006Open Taxonomy Cons What happens if too many different ways of organizing the same info get elected? –The administrator impeaches (un-elects) select categories to streamline the tree. Old links would still work The original contributors would still see them. –Control the election threshold as a function of the # of existing alternate paths to the same content.

14. 146/10/2006Open Taxonomy Cons (cont.) Too Complicated? –In the simplest case, it degenerates into just another simple tagging site. The structure isn’t required. –If someone wants to add structure to unstructured tags it won’t make it any more difficult to use.

15. 156/10/2006Open Taxonomy Enterprise Considerations Imagine armies of highly paid staff, spinning their wheels, not finding what they’re looking for. Corporate users would be better behaved, more conscientious. Threshold for getting a category elected could be reduced to a couple of votes at the leaf node level. Could be spliced onto a fixed corporate taxonomy. Site-dependent meta-data templates for all content indexed (date, project, version, department, etc.).

16. 166/10/2006Open Taxonomy Current Status SourceForge Project (pending review) Looking for volunteers Website in the works

17. 176/10/2006Open Taxonomy Future additions: SOA service Import/export –OWL (Semantic Web Ontology) –SKOS (W3C Thesaurus) –XBRL (Extended Business Reporting Language) Use Corporate User management systems. Synchronize with Corporate Taxonomies

18. 186/10/2006Open Taxonomy Summary Merge: –Tagging –Grass roots content indexing –Web Directories … and Open Taxonomy delivers “The Long Tail” of obscure searches on a platter.