::scr Dressing up the computer

[celia romaniuk]

On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Simon Wistow wrote:

> There's a good article on topic mapping at 
> 
> "Quick and dirty Topic Mapping"
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/01/topic_map.html  
> 
> which is interesting to me as an implementor rather than a designer
> because it espouses the 80% is better than 100% rule (which sounds like
> a very Joel Spolsky thing to say but bear with me anyway) ... basically
> it warns against designing taxonomies which are too detailed and make
> them grow organically. 

Well, first up, when you do a taxonomy it's you don't usually try and
define everything (unless you're doing a universal library catalogue or
something, which takes hundreds of years). You work out the most important
content (if you say "business critical" to managers they may stop looking
blank and start nodding) and define the scope of the taxonomy around that.

And then, of course, it needs to be a living thing, evolving with the
content and the people it's for.

I liked the article, but sorting your bookmarks is one thing, and a
taxonomy for an intranet for 30,000 people is something different (the
latter is the project I may well be working on for the next nine months).
It's a question of how much content there is and the complexity of that
content, and of course, who it's for and the purporse it's meant to serve.

Celia