Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T09:06:16.960Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Taxonomies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

Christine Miskin
Christine Miskin
Affiliation:
What are they? Why do you need to know about them? and when will they become indispensable? Christine Miskin explains.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Taxonomies are becoming trendy! What do you, as a legal information professional, need to know about them? Do you already know a good deal because they appeared under the guise of classification schemes when you were studying librarianship or information science? In this article an attempt will be made to explain in comprehensible terms the place of taxonomies in current thinking about information retrieval, and in particular their relevance to your work as a legal information manager.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 16 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aitchison, Jean and others. Thesaurus construction and use:a practical manual. 4th ed.Aslib, 2000.Google Scholar
Batty, David (1998) WWW—wealth, weariness or waste: controlled vocabulary and thesauri in support of information access. D-Lib Magazine November www.dlib.org/dlib/november98. Clearly written article on potential of library techniques of classification and thesauri to help organise access to information in an electronic environment.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Neil (2001) Knowledge seeking. Legal IT 2(9), 48–49. Importance of developing taxonomies right from the start of the business cycle in a law firm's KM strategies.Google Scholar
Currier, Sarah and Wake, Susannah (2001) Negotiating subject access: resource discovery on the web. Briefing based on ongoing research of HILT project into use of taxonomies in academic libraries to make information accessible during cross-subject searching. Further information is available on the Web site—see p. 19.Google Scholar
Dextre Clarke, Stella (2001) Scoping study for a pan-government thesaurus. Final report prepared for the Office of the e-Envoy. Further information is available on the Web site—details below.Google Scholar
Douglas, J.G. Catching a Babel Fish: the role of language and context in information and knowledge management systems. This is a paper from the 9th Specials, Health and Law Libraries conference. Although it deals with building a taxonomy for use in an Australian government agricultural department, it contains some interesting observations on the use and meanings of language in the context of managing huge volumes of information, www.alia.org.au/conferences/shllc/2001/papers/douglas.htmlGoogle Scholar
Dow, Robert (2001) Developing your intranet lessons from the building site. PLC 12(8), 94. The key message from this article is that you must classify the materials on your intranet and taxonomies could cover subject matter, document type, jurisdiction and originating department.Google Scholar
Dow, Robert (2000) Legal intranets: the new law library. Law Librarian 31(3), 147–149. Deals with integrating a firm's internal information with external information supplied by publishers. It also discusses the benefits of using manually generated classification schemes for both navigation and searching and posits the idea of a common classification scheme for law.Google Scholar
Edols, Liz (2001) “Taxonomies are what?” www.freepintcom/issues/04001. htm. Useful basic article reviewing the various definitions of taxonomies, their value, the Montague site as an example and some software sources.Google Scholar
FID (1977) Knowledge organisation for information retrieval. Proceedings of the sixth international study conference on classification research. The Hague, International Federation for Information and Documentation, 1997.Google Scholar
Field, Mark (2000) The art of classification: making use of an old new business tool. Law Librarian 31(3), 187–189. Deals with applications of classification and classificatory techniques in business the process with advent of e-commerce and role for librarians in exploiting these techniques.Google Scholar
Gilchrist, Alan (2001) Corporate taxonomies: report on a survey of current practice. Online Information Review 25(2), 94–102. Initial results of TFPL research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, Anthony (2001) Classification systems. Knowledge Management 05, 15–17.Google Scholar
Explains what a taxonomy is for the lay person, how to construct one and how they can be used in e-business to organise the information on a Web site.Google Scholar
Hyams, Elspeth (2000) Categorical imperative. Library Association Record 12(12), 682–683. Poses question whether organisations need taxonomies and reports on a meeting where the preliminary findings from TFPL's research were discussed.Google Scholar
Koehler, Wallace C. (1999) Classifying Web sites and Web pages: the use of metrics and URL characters as markers. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 31(1), 21–31. How librarians and computer scientists are attempting to bring order to the chaos of the Web by using classification, thesaural and keywording techniques and by taking 361 randomly selected sites and examining how they are organised.Google Scholar
McCracken, Campbell (2001) Tree of knowledge.http./www.modscotsman. freeserve.co.uk/articles/taxonomies/htm. This is a fairly basic article describing what a taxonomy is, discussing thesauri and mentioning TFPL's research.Google Scholar
Miller, Paul (2000) I say what I mean, but do I mean what I say? Ariadne, issue 23 www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/metadata/intro.html. MODELS 11 workshop on issues surrounding use of controlled terminology and thesauri funded by UKOLN. Useful basic explanations of terms involved.Google Scholar
Quaresma, Paulo and Rodrigues, Irene (2000) Automatic classification and intelligent clustering for WWWeb information retrieval systems. Journal of Information, Law and Technology (2) http://elj.warwick.ac.uk. An attempt to build an intelligent interface for juridical information retrieval systems based on Portuguese legal documents.Google Scholar
Roberts-Witt, Sarah L. (1999) Hard-won wisdom for creating a workable knowledge classification system, www.phys.uni.torun.pl and published in Knowledge Management in 1999. This is a very useful article on taxonomies and their value in the corporate environment with examples from KPMG and Ernst and Young.Google Scholar
Savic, Dobrica (1995) Automatic classification of office documents: review of available methods and techniques. Records Management Quarterly 10, 3–18. Review of Al and classic methods of indexing documents plus literature survey.Google Scholar
Song, Min (2000) Visualisation in information retrieval: a three level analysis. Journal of Information Science 26(1), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturdy, Derek (2000) Content management for internal-external integration. Low Librarian 31 (3), 152–155. Explanation of use of three “Cs” in knowledge management with emphasis on citation metadata, software applications and linking strategies using information node methodology.Google Scholar
Sturdy, Derek (2000) Classification out of the closet. Paper given at Online Conference, 12 2000.Google Scholar
Sturdy, Derek (2001) Taxonomies and legal knowledge management. Granite & Comfrey.Google Scholar
Sturdy, Derek (2002) Squirrels and nuts: metadata and knowledge Software management. Business Information Review, 01 2002. Use of metadata, role of search engines, use of XML and importance of relational databases in constructing km systems. Written for general journal but provides useful definitions of technical terms.Google Scholar
TFPL (2000) Taxonomies for business: access and connectivity in a wired world. Report addressing the realisation of business value through implementing knowledge structures.Google Scholar
UKOLN Metadata group (1997) The role of classification schemes in Internet resource discovery and description, www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/classification/class_1.htm. This is a work package of the Telematics for Research Project Desire and investigates use of classification schemes to aid retrieval in a network environment.Google Scholar
White, Martin (2002) Top ten for 2002. Information World Review 2002, 176 (January), 14, 17Google Scholar
Wood, (Philip)Know how: tackling the dark titan. PLC 2001, 12(5), 95–96. “At one time the indexer or the classifier was regarded as rather a mousy character who wore sandals. Nowadays, the worth and value of this skill has come into its own.” I suppose that makes a change from buns and glasses but the basic premise again is that our skills are vital in building up a law firm's knowhow collection.Google Scholar