Some highlights of questions related to taxonomies/thesauri/content management/enterprise IA/search:

Merging thesauri...do it or not?
What other tools besides meta-tagging?
What are topic maps? How can you use them for aiding discovery?
What are the critical compoonents for enterprise content management strategy?
What are the alternatives to meta-tagging?
How does metadata help you visualize information? Which projects should people be watching?
and more...

The video archive can be located at the FLICC website. | My Notes from the Webcast. (Word 2000)

Where is IA these days? I keep asking myself this over the past 6 months. Just when I thought I was going to ramp up again with the community I had to really step back and take inventory. I was confused and wondering where is this all taking me? Where is what I'm doing taking the community? Where is the value-add when I watch the SIG-IA list almost dissintegrate before our eyes. I'm frustrated and I'm trying really hard to be patient with what I see. I'm burned out and I'm totally out of the loop. Do I want back in? Is it worth it? Is it where I want to be?

...

A new series of articles at Boxes and Arrows will be coming up over the next few months on faceted classification. Karl, Fred, and Mike written a quick overview of the topics they will be covering.

I've provided some thoughts on areas they could probably touch on if they get the chance. I'm definitely looking forward to this thread as a way to communicate with colleagues on the value of integrating a controlled vocabulary with web design and development.

Two articles from ASIST Bulletin October/November 2002 issue.

What Can You Do with XML Today? Jay ven Eman

Automatic Indexing: A Matter of Degree Marjorie M. Hlava

I thought the articles were informative from an introductory level. So if you're interested in XML and Automatic Indexing take a few moments to peruse the articles.

Christina Wodtke
Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (2002), New Riders Publishing

It's been a few years now since I first got hooked onto the web and first entered my first search query into a web search box. So Google gets me what I want most of the time, but it's not always the only search engine I go to. Just like newspapers, I like to go to a few other engines to get a good mix of what I'd like to get.

My search experience...

Remember seeing that really cool diagram in the IA's cubicle the other day, you know the one that looks like this? Well the brains behind that diagram, just published a book describing the various components and why it's good for your business.

Jesse James Garrett
The Elements of User Experience(2002), New Riders Publishing

MIT/Stanford Vlab will hold a presentation in April involving the Semantic Web.

"The Path to the Semantic Web"

April 16, 2002 at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Bishop Auditorium

Just a few thesauri out there in use. If you have anymore to add, just drop me an email.

Web Thesauri Compendium

Alcohol and Other Drug

Art and Architecture Thesaurus

ASIS Thesaurus of Information Science

Getty Geographic Names

MeSH

NAL Agricultural Thesaurus

Bloom - Taxonomy of Education Objectives
DOT - Dictionary of Occupational Titles
WICH - Management Information Systems Program
ERIC - Education Resources Information Center Thesaurus
WordNet
Cyc - Cyc Ontology
HS - Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System

Taxonomy Manager at Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_31.htm

Questions to think about:
1. What is the content that will be organized?
structured or unstructured data, documents, multimedia, etc.

2. Who is the target audience?
internal business users, web end users, etc.

3. How will the taxonomy be implemented? Is this taxonomy part of a tagging process for applying metadata to content?
use for indexing content, bundle with the search tools, etc.

4. What is the goal? Improve searching, categorize content for a system, develop topic maps of domain.

5. How much content is there?

Just wanted to share two resources I found useful while searching for thesaurus development and management resources. These definitely have been recurring requests in the SIG IA world.

American Society of Indexers Thesaurus Software
http://www.asindexing.org/site/thessoft.shtml

Willpower Information: Software for Building and Editing Thesauri
http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/thessoft.htm

My colleague Jeanene Landers-Steinberg, Director of Web Operations for Schwab Learning Foundation has a chapter in Darci DiNucci's new book, Adobe Master Class Website Redesigns.

I would like to also recommend you go ahead and check out Schwab Learning for resources on learning differences.

Lots of talk going on in the blog community about the need of metadata, specifically from Doug Kaye's Blog.

Lou has posted some interesting rebuttals about the topic.

Even Christina has picked up on the story.

What I think? It's a bunch of misinformation on the value of metadata. Many of us metadata folks don't apply metadata for its own sake...there really are reasons why we do it. In some cases the organization of information is a reason, another is that the user needs ways to search for aspects of a piece of information, and in the case of taxonomies someone out there needs some order to find similarities and differences in understanding a piece of information.

Metadata and taxonomies are representations of the ying and yang. There needs to be harmony between the information and ways of understanding what that information is about.

As for blogs, I think metadata and a taxonomy could help bridge our understanding of each other's thought processes. Without a common vocabulary we disrupt the ying and yang of our communities. We could potentially create conflict where there doesn't need to be one. It's not about creating agreement on what the "truth" is, it's about understanding each other.

Yeah! I'm not the only one thinking about metadata and classification at the moment :)
Check out Peter Merholz talk about information science type stuff...and he even mentions Ranganathan. I'll have to look into an honorary librarian badge for him and manual on "Shushing 101."

I'm starting to find more articles surrounding the new efforts in developing taxonomies and thesauri for competitive advantage.
It seems that knowledge management and enterprise portals with its focus on technologies will be failing many corporations.
So in this information/knowledge economy, will taxonomies & thesauri solve a corporation's needs?

I haven't read this report, but the executive summary does validate alot of
my current work and where I see the field of Information Architecture headed.

I got this off the SIGIA-Listserv. Thanks for sharing Stacy.
Here's TFPL's own report about their taxonomies research:
http://www.tfpl.com/areas_of_expertise/taxonomies/_report_/taxonomy_report.html

Semantic Web

Recently Lou Rosenfeld posted to the SIG IA about the Future of IA. One aspect was a discussion on metadata. Some folks on the list have hashed out navigation, structure, meaning, but for me it keeps coming back to how my interests have morphed from IA & user experience from the design standpoint to more of the data architecture, metadata, taxonomy, thesauri development. I thought the Semantic Web was a good place to start on this topic of where I think IA is going, but you don't have to take my word for it...