Choose Your Words Wisely: A Crash Course in Taxonomy Development (MARAC/NEA 2015 Joint Meeting; S.4) March 20, 2015

Choose your words wisely

Kathryn gronsbell, AVPreserve MARAC/NEA Boston | March 20, 2015

a crash course in taxonomy development

What is a TAXONOMY & how DO

you build it?

GROUP ACTIVITY

“A collection of controlled vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure”

NATIONAL INFORMATION STANDARDS ORGANIZATION

By I-5 Design and Manufacture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/i5design/6075050600/

What’s the point?

• Indexing support Consistency of labeling, tagging, efficiency, disambiguate terms

• Retrieval support Improve search results

• Organization & navigation support Guide user navigation

WORLD WAR 1

GREAT WAR

FIRST WORLD WAR

WORLD WAR ONE

WORLD WAR, 1914-1918

WWI

WORLD WAR, 1914-1918

Worldcat.org

WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF TAXONOMIES?

TERM LISTS CLASSIFICATIONS/ CATEGORIES

RELATIONSHIP LISTS

simple complex

examples: !Controlled vocabularies !Synonyms !Authority files (named entities)

examples: !

Hierarchical taxonomy

!Poly-hierarchical

taxonomy !

Faceted taxonomy

!

examples: !

Thesauri !

Ontologies !!

www.taxonomies-sig.org

Phases of development

1Research

🔍

•TAXONOMISTS

•INDEXERS OR TAGGERS

•END USERS

2STRategy

📰

Taxonomies are technology agnostic*

CORE TEAM • Taxonomists: Create terms, interpret existing vocabularies

• Subject-area specialist: Test & respond to terms and methodologies

• Project lead: Manage project and engage participants

ADVISORS • Sponsor: Leadership-level participants

• Reviewers: General review

3Design

📾

BROAD TERM

NARROW TERM

NARROWER TERM

level0

1

2

4Development

implementation&

📄👥

select term

ADD TO CONCEPT

TEST

=v.1

💻

5Administration

∞

PHASE POSSIBLE DELIVERABLES

Research Data dump, existing vocabularies

Strategy Card sorting, governance skeleton

Design Draft concepts and sample terms

Development/Implementation Working draft (v.1)

Administration Governance document, v.1.1/v.2….

💡

👤*

• SKOS - Simple Knowledge Organization System!• OWL - Web Ontology Language!• Building Enterprise Taxonomies, Darin L. Stewart (2011)!• The Accidental Taxonomist, Heather Hedden (2010)

‘concepts extracted from the content’

card sorting

MARAC and NEA !decide to create a

shared repository for the!2015 Joint Conference

card

sort

ing

1. Sort provided terms into piles

2. Refer to handout

3. when you’re done sorting

name that concept

1. Write a 1-2 word label per pile

2. Can’t? Re-sort until you can!

[email protected]

@k_grons