Google’s upcoming IPO of several billion dollars illustrates the importance of information search and retrieval. Today’s event, Using Taxonomies to Organize Enterprise Information, demonstrated the limitations of automated methods like Google and the continued significance of real people for the management of information. In fact, Gartner claims that there is a 80% chance that the number of professionals handling knowledge mapping will double by 2005.
Taxonomies are hierarchical classification of things that shows relationships among categories that supports the discovery and access to information. Yahoo! is an example of a taxonomy for all types of information. It has limited value because the indexing is done by non-subject matter experts. Data increases in value when it is easy to find and collected in databases that can be merged because they have similarly defined variables. www.taxonomywarehouse.com is a good resource to find free and purchasable taxonomies. The event’s sponsor, Convera, also sells taxonomies as part of its software package.