Taxonomy Development Process

Here’ a nice handout from Boeing Company librarians Kathryn Breininger and Mary Whittaker on their taxonomy development process. It’s nicely staged and explained (and is quite similar to the process in my book, which is reassuring). However I’d suggest caution on their faith in user interviews for both the taxonomy design and evaluation (information use needs are rarely conscious or easily articulated, and often what people say is a poor representation of their real needs). At both stages you need empirical data from observation, documented activity, search logs, task-completion tests such as card-sorting. Other than that proviso, a fine piece of work. Thanks to Gwen Harris at Taxonomy Watch for this.

0 Comment so far

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (<strong>, <em>, <a>) Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. URLs are automatically converted into links.