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Notes on “A Taxonomy Primer,” “Ten Taxonomy Myths,” and additional readings

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A Taxonomy Primer, Warner, Amy J. (2002)

Ten Taxonomy Myths, Montague Institute (2002)

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization By Elaine Svenonius (2002)

 

The Taxonomy Primer was pretty straightforward, but the Myths were more interesting. I especially liked myths 1 and 2, because I think when most people think taxonomy they think of a single, giant, all-encompassing tree that everything fits into exactly. It can be very useful to have a number of taxonomies for the same information, and there are some great examples on the web, where a site my be organized by product type but then also by region or customer group, allowing browsing from each perspective.

One image I found particularly enlightening was in the Svenonius article, where taxonomies were described as “elaborate Victorian edifices” and contrasted with “jerrybuilt systems [that] could meet the needs of most users most of the time.” This is an excellent description of where library people and web people seem to have a disconnect. Coming at thing more from the web side myself, I often think of grand schemes to classify everything and put everything into neatly labeled boxes—like Dewey or the Library of Congress Classification Schemes—as too big, too elaborate, and too old. I this is why many of the people who first started organizing information on web sites and the like don’t look to library science for inspiration, despite the wealth that is there. Most of the web people have only worked with systems that are small enough to be informal, personal enough to be ideosyncratic, or targeted enough to simply model how current users talk about the information already. In other words, jerrybuilt.

Later in the chapter, though, the writer states that organizing information is different from organizing anything else, and is in particular not to be done with “routine application of the database modeling techniques” used in business. While I agree that organizing information would be substantially different from organizing employees, the rationale given (something to do with works and differences in editions of them) lends itself really well to more-or-less common relational database structures. I think there are important issues, but too often the issues I see brought up are superficial.

Notes on “Creating a Controlled Vocabulary”

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Creating a Controlled Vocabulary

 Fast, Karl, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel (2003)

 

This was a good rundown of the general process of creating a controlled vocabulary, but a lot of this seems pretty apparent to me. I guess I shouldn’t assume that this stuff is obvious, though, given how many companies make web sites or intranets without really bothering to find out how their users use vocabulary for their domain, or even establishing a vocabulary, for that matter.

The two most important points, to me, are number 5, “Establish a record of the rules you are using if you are creating a large thesaurus” and number 8, “Go back and refine. What can be improved?” In fact I think the whole notion of controlled vocabulary is misguided if there’s no clear rationale for it and attempts to update and maintain the terms at all times. Language in any field is constantly changing, and the pace of change is always accelerating. Anyone who was building a directory of Internet services would have left off the World Wide Web in 1989, and any list about self-publishing on the web would probably have left off the term “blog” in 1998. How useful would those pick lists be today?

Controlled vocabulary can be damaging if there’s no mechanism for change, or that mechanism is left unused. I don’t know why, but humanity seems to have some undying urge to compile things around ourselves into grand lists and hierarchies that are supposed to encompass all of what is or ever has been, ignoring our complete ignorance of what the future will bring. It’s not that classification in and of itself is bad, it’s that there’s a tendency to get to the “end” and say, “there, it’s done, and set in stone forever.”

 

 

 

Software Comparison: ASP.NET vs PHP

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ASP.NET and PHP

Virtually every medium or large web site now uses some kind of server-side scripting to generate web pages and interactive features instead of static html. A number of technologies are used for this purpose, including PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, ColdFusion, and JSP. This paper will look at Microsoft’s ASP.NET and an open-source alternative, PHP, and compare them in terms of cost, performance, support, features and ease of use for web development.

 

Comparing ASP and PHP can be difficult because they are not exactly the same class of software. PHP is simply a server-side scripting language. The PHP homepage describes it as “a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.”1 ASP, more properly ASP.NET, is not a language per se, and allows users to program Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) in Jscript, Vbscript, and C#, among others. ASP.NET is a little harder to define than PHP. ASP stands for Active Server Pages, and .NET, according to Microsoft, “is a set of Microsoft software technologies for connecting information, people, systems, and devices. It enables a high level of software integration through the use of Web services—small, discrete, building-block applications that connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over the Internet.”2

 

Despite major structural differences, the two can and should be compared because they can be used to create the same kinds of medium-to-large, dynamic, often database-driven web sites. Server-side scripting allows sites to easily edit and update information, offer interactive features like forums and personalization, and track user traffic.

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